The Social Backgrounds of Nazi Leaders: A Statistical Analysis of Political Elites in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933

This article compares the social backgrounds of Nazi leaders and representatives of democratic parties in the Weimar Republic. It does not advance any overarching new narrative on Nazism’s social origins, but rather aims to present a nuanced statistical picture of Weimar’s political elites. The results of this analysis are derived from an index of German members of parliament and from a new dataset, which has recently been collected from the Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), Germany’s largest biographical encyclopaedia. Together, these two samples cover more than 2000 German politicians, industrialists, diplomats, political writers, academics, high state officials, and important journalists. This article reveals sociological differences between the politicians who led the Nazi party in parliament and those elites that promoted Nazism in the media, in academia, or within the German civil service. While Nazi politicians in the Reichstag were recruited from a variety of social classes, ranging from industrial workers to members of the aristocracy, National Socialist elites outside the parliament typically belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum and sociologically resembled the highly educated members of democratic and liberal parties. Overall, the picture of a generation of Nazi leaders emerges that was sociologically far more heterogeneous than is often recognized by historians.     

Survey mode effects on measured income inequality

We study the effect of interview modes on estimates of economic inequality which are based on survey data. We exploit variation in interview modes in the Austrian EU-SILC panel, where between 2007 and 2008 the interview mode was switched from personal interviews to telephone interviews for some but not all participants. We combine methods from the program evaluation literature with methods from the distributional decomposition literature to obtain causal estimates of the effect of interview mode on estimated inequality. We find that the interview mode has a large effect on estimated inequality, where telephone interviews lead to a larger downward bias. The effect of the mode is much smaller for robust inequality measures such as interquantile ranges, as these are not sensitive to the tails of the distribution. The magnitude of effects we find are of a similar order as the differences in many international and intertemporal comparisons of inequality.     

Inside Nazi Germany and PR war films in America

This article analyses Jack Glenn and Louis de Rochemont's Inside Nazi Germany (1938), a screen magazine from The March of Time. The aim of this paper is to analyze Inside Nazi Germany as a public relations war effort of the 20th century. Arising from the informative and propagandistic strategy of late 1930s newsreels, this documentary was made using very appropriate narrative techniques to award it the dimension of objectivity and truthfulness characteristic of public relations messages, without losing sight of its educational and persuasive function. From this standpoint, Inside Nazi Germany constituted one of the clearest precedents of public relations war films in America.     

Wer wurde als homosexuell verfolgt?

This paper investigates the impact of the social structure on the persecution of homosexuals in Austria during the Nazi regime and the following democratic Republic. So far local studies for the German case have come to the conclusion that the middle class has been victim to the same, or event to a greater extent, of state-supported homophobia as the lower social class. An analysis of court files confirms this finding partly but reveals the working class as the mainly affected social group in the Austrian case. Social status, however, did only have a marginal influence on the length of imprisonment. The fact that different occupational groups were overrepresented among the sentenced homosexuals in the two considered periods of time (1938?C1944; 1945?C1955) points to systematic patterns of repression. As historical data is sparse we can only formulate hypotheses on why certain persons were more likely to be sentenced for being homosexual than others.     

BAD NEWS FROM THE FRONT AND FROM ABOVE: BOMBING RAIDS,MILITARY FATALITIES AND THE DEATH PENALTY IN NAZI GERMANY

We examine how the decision-making of political elites respond to an imminent external threat to the existence of the state in times of war. To do so, we exploit exogeneous variation in exposure to battle deaths and bombing raids to estimate the effect of variation in the intensity of war on the probability that individuals charged with treason and/or high treason in Nazi Germany received the death sentence. A doubling of the number of military fatalities as well as bombing raids in the same week in which a defendant was sentenced increased the likelihood of receiving the death penalty by about 10 percentage points. (JEL K14, N44)     

From management to leadership: a shift towards understanding the organizational complexity of multidisciplinary collaboration

Multidisciplinary collaboration is central to modern social welfare organizations, yet knowledge about the organizational context of collaboration is scarce. The study objective was to establish multidisciplinary collaboration by designing an organizational field study. The aim of this article is to explore managerial roles and perspectives during an organizational process of developing multidisciplinary collaboration. Eighteen management meetings, held during a two-year period, are analysed. The analysis reveals that the management gradually grasps the complexity of multidisciplinary collaboration; negotiations on the concept are ongoing while their point of view changes from distant to involved. The management takes leadership towards multidisciplinary collaboration through a series of legitimacy-related negotiations, illustrating the organizational and managerial contexts of multidisciplinary collaboration as well as introducing it as a new type of managerial task.     

Strategy and structure in the human firm: Beyond hierarchy,toward flexibility and integration

In response to global competition and a rapidly changing business environment, corporate strategies and structures are becoming more flexible and integrated. This article develops a model of the flexible, integrated firm, a model that focuses on corporate strategy and organizational structure. The flexible-integrated (FI) firm's mode of operation represents tendencies present in high performance, global companies, particularly as these companies have been understood by leading managerial thinkers. The FI-Firm's operations are contrasted with the hierarchical (H) firm. The H-Firm incorporates strategy and structure in a very different way, which reflects the dominant operating mode of the large Western corporation during much of the second half of the twentieth century. Given the nature of today's competition, there are many reasons for believing that the FI-Firm is not only more flexible but also more efficient than the H-Firm.     

The Representation of the Holocaust in the Soviet Press, 1941–1945

Abstract

The article presents the first in-depth examination of the representation of the Holocaust in the Soviet press during the period of its perpetration, 1941–1945. The article illustrates that alongside growing anti-Semitism, both among the population and the regime, Soviet journalists, primarily Il'ya Ehrenburg and Vasilii Grossman, reported on the suffering and murder of European Jewry. The article examines the Soviet presentation of Nazi racial theory and compares it to the representation of Nazi racial theory in the American and British press during the war. The article looks at the reasons behind Soviet press coverage of the Holocaust, such as the use of atrocities to motivate the people to fight. It also examines the way in which the Soviet press used the Nazi persecution of the Jewish population as a means of distinguishing the fascist and socialist systems and highlighting the equality of all peoples, which it claimed existed in the Soviet Union. The article examines the Soviet representation of the behaviour of the Jews under occupation, focusing on the three main attributes — resistance, dignity and the brotherhood of the peoples. In general, the article strives to illustrate that the Soviet press reported on the Holocaust during the war and recognized the racial nature of the Nazi persecution and extermination of European Jewry.     

Communism and pro‐soviet feeling among the Jews of East London, 1935–45

In the 1945 general election, a Communist was elected to Parliament from Mile End, Stepney, a constituency populated in large part by working‐class Jews of East European origin. Pro‐Soviet feeling in the preceding decade was strong, and was translated into ideological and political activity on behalf of the USSR by various East London branches of trade unions; friendly societies such as the Arbeter Ring (Workers’ Circle); Yiddishist groups, and popular front organizations such as the Jewish Fund for Soviet Russia. In late 1943 two prominent Soviet Jewish emissaries, Itzik Feffer and Shloime Mikhoels, visited England. Among their hosts were the Jewish organizations of Stepney. The effects of their tour, and the emotional intensity with which East London Jews followed the course of the Russo‐German war, were instrumental in creating the climate of opinion enabling the CP to post its 1945 victory.     

The past and the future: Austria facing a new stage of RTD co‐operation with its neighbours

In comparison with other countries, and considering its size, Austria spends a significant amount of funds on RTD co‐operation with its neighbouring countries to the East. This eastward orientation is not specific to the science and research collaboration field, but a more general characteristic of the Austrian policy framework and political culture, with strong historical roots. The research collaboration between Austria and its neighbours builds upon a long‐standing tradition, having obtained a strong impulse in the first years of transformation in the CEECs, through the establishment of (bilateral) research programmes.     

Developing the Learning Door: a case study in youth participatory program planning

This article presents the results of a case study in youth participatory program planning conducted in the context of a nonformal technology-education program in eastern Finland. The purpose of the program was to have youth, university, and business stakeholders work together to create the Learning Door, a door that would meet the needs of older people and people with disabilities. The participatory program planning process that was used involved clarifying the mission, roles, and modes of collaboration as well as creating stakeholder matrices, logic models, program plans, and implementation plans. It was found that the observed program planning process was similar to the intended planning process and that the process was well received by the planning participants. The lessons learned include clarifying the nature of collaboration before the program gets underway, reviewing program planning steps often, and making clear distinctions between logic models and implementations plans.     

Banishing the past: The German avant-garde and Nazi art

How do radical changes in cultural policy affect artistic reputations? Nazi policy to control memory—through the stigmatization of artists and the confiscation of their art—was less than fully successful for two main reasons: (1) Refugees and the German need for foreign exchange carried many pieces into the international market, where they escaped destruction from bombing raids; and (2) in post-war Germany a considerable effort was made not only to connect with a “broken” tradition but also to locate victims and to salvage as much of their work and reputations as possible. Allied efforts to banish Nazi-approved art from the collective memory have been far more successful. Many works that survive still rest in repositories not open to the public and, while work by a few Nazi favorites are still in demand, public commemoration remains politically controversial. Whether the reputation of an artist survives such sharp breaks in the political culture depends not only on the physical preservation of prior work but also on decisions as to who merits a place in the archives accessible to posterity.     

German seafarers,anti‐fascism and the anti‐Stalinist left: the ‘Antwerp Group’ and Edo Fimmen's International Transport Workers' Federation, 1933–40

Between the mid‐1930s and the beginning of the Second World War, a group of German seamen based in Antwerp combined with Amsterdam‐based Edo Fimmen, secretary of the International Transport Workers' Federation, to wage a campaign against the Nazi government among the sailors of the German merchant fleet. They organized cells of supporters on German ships, encouraged informal resistance, circulated propaganda and planned sabotage. The Antwerp Group was a breakaway from the Comintern‐aligned International of Seafarers and Harbour Workers (ISH). The Antwerp men were reacting against the ineffectiveness of the response of the German communist leadership to Hitler's takeover of power, and against the growing subordination of the ISH to Soviet interests. By highlighting the role of anti‐Stalinist militants in the anti‐fascism of the 1930s, the article contributes to the recent scholarship on anti‐fascism – a scholarship that has tended to emphasize the transnationalism and ideological diversity of anti‐fascism, rather than seeing it in national terms, or as a monolithic entity controlled by Moscow.     

German-Polish migration: the elusive search for a German nation-state

"This article examines past and present migrations to Germany from the perspective of nation-state formation.... Focusing on the many experiences with the Polish minority (ranging from the eighteenth century to the present), this essay suggests that Germans have never discovered an acceptable and workable approach for dealing with large non-German minorities in the German nation-state. Rather, different regimes at different times have vacillated between an exclusive approach founded on nationalist principles and practices and an inclusive one founded on liberal principles and practices.... The confusion over the two approaches produces not only a confused immigration policy, but also reflects deep-seated confusion over the definition of the new German state and identity of the newly united German nation."     

GERMAN BY VIRTUE OF OTHERS: THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN THREE DEBATES

This paper argues that German identity is primarily constructed in opposition to a negative ‘other’, with ‘the Jew’ as prototypical other. The general trajectory of German identity construction throughout the 1980s and 1990s was towards the normalization of German identity, a mending in response to the radical break in German history by the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. This development will be traced through three debates that crosscut the realms of professional scholarship and the public – the Historians' Debate of 1985/86, the German unification debate of 1989 and the Goldhagen debate of 1996 – with focus on the contributions by professional scholars. The basic dichotomous structure of self-other is complicated by recurring themes in the construction of contemporary German identity. Three central themes or problems are identified in the debates: efforts at exclusively positive definitions of German identity, the definition of German identity in relation to a negative other and the location of the Holocaust in German history. The focus in the interpretation of these themes is on the subtle changes of identity over time, conceptualized in terms of repetition with change. The essay closes with a plea for a more open and inclusive definition of German identity and some thoughts on the role of the public intellectual in German society.     

Left-wing isolationism,literature and ideology in America during the run-up to World War II Malcolm Cowley,Waldo Frank,Archibald MacLeish,Lewis Mumford,John Strachey and the New Masses

Abstract

In the run-up to the Second World War, the left in the US came under increasing pressure to conform to the increasingly totalitarian Stalinist line. The relation between literature, ideologies, political analysis and a world actually preparing for war became extremely complex and fraught. In October 1940, the American Communist journal, New Masses, denounced the well-known American writers Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank, Archibald MacLeish, Lewis Mumford and the British Marxist intellectual John Strachey as virtual Nazi sympathisers. This article takes a cartoon relating to the denunciations and reconstructs in historical detail the reasons for them. The stories throw a new and complex light on the sometimes surprising relations between ideology and literature of the period as well as adding a footnote to debates on pre-war American isolationism.     

A Matter of Time: Examining Collective Memory in Historical Perspective in Postwar Berlin

Abstract  This article examines how officially designated memorial sites marking resistance to and persecution by the Nazi regime in Berlin have changed in the postwar era. Clearly the content of memorial culture changes over time. So, however, do the political and bureaucratic channels through which memorial landscapes themselves are created, and thus the avenues through which states (in this case the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic) construct landscapes of official collective memory. Such an analysis reveals not only the changes and continuities in the form and content of official representations, but also the changing relationship between a state, its people, and the collection of officially approved objects in the urban landscape designed to convey representations of a city's and a country's past. Looking closely at these intersections also makes clear that the landscape of official memorials must not be identical with collective memory understood more broadly.     

Modes of state intervention and business group performance in China's transitional economy

This paper examines the contingent nature of state intervention affecting business group performance in the context of a transition economy by identifying different modes of state intervention in China's transitional economy. Using data on China's 76 business groups collected in 2006, I find that, at the group level, modes of state intervention have different economic effects on business group performance, depending on the specific modes of intervention and the context of the institutional environment in China's transitional economy. Through direct intervention – such as ownership, officials, and Chinese Communist Party members at the group level – the Chinese state failed to provide positive economic effects. However, the result demonstrates the state's ability to provide positive economic effects by matching the functional demands of the emerging market, such as loans from state-controlled banks as financial support.     

Remapping the German Homeland: Germania and Catholic Efforts to Mobilise Continued Support during the First World War

Abstract

Despite a minority status that often left them viewed as outsiders, German Catholics – like their compatriots more generally – rallied behind the war effort in 1914. Indeed, intense involvement in the war effort came to be seen as a way to finally squash any remaining suspicions about whether Catholics could truly ever be at home in a country with a Protestant majority. Yet, as the war continued and conditions in Germany worsened, the divisions both within the Catholic Centre Party and among all political parties in the Reich began to resurface and cast a shadow on the common war effort. In an attempt to maintain unity and continued mobilisation for the war, Catholic rhetoric in outlets like the newspaper Germania – a leading organ of the Centre Party – crafted a narrative that redrew the mental map of the German homeland. To do so, the rhetoric relied upon formative geographic tropes established right after unification in 1871 that stressed regionalism and diversity as the hallmark of unity and Germanness. At first sticking closely to efforts at emphasising the centrality of Catholic regions on the periphery, the rhetoric in late 1915 and early 1916 turned towards stretching the map of the German homeland east, especially to the Baltics.