Fascism And Nazism Essay Example

- Explain the process of Gleichschaltung and give some concrete examples. What was Gleichschaltung? How "successful" was it before the end of the Nazi regime in May 1945?
Gleischaltung was the achieving of total power in Germany by Hitler and the Nazi Party confirming that there was only one person who was really in command. Hitler set about achieving this through various means which included the complete denuding of state power and parliamentary process and centralizing everything in what was called the ‘FuhrerPrinzip’ which intrinsically meant that the Fuhrer was all powerful (Kershaw p 75).
The process of power consolidation began in earnest just after Hitler was elected to power as German Chancellor in 1933. He set about dismantling the democratic structures of government and centralizing power in his personal figure. Another aspect of the Gleischaltung was the forcible stripping of dignity from the Jews who were rapidly to become an alien race in Germany itself. Their property and goods was seized by a series of decrees and they were frequently abused which led to most of them fleeing or relocating elsewhere.
However the main scope of Gleischaltung was the ‘Strength through Joy’ concept which was the specific co-ordination of several social groups with one goal in mind. This meant that the Nazi Party took over total control of the country’s social fabric and the forcible co-ordination of all social clubs and organizations meant that those which were hostile to the Nazi Party were completely removed from the picture. This process meant that even hobbies came under a form of regimental control with the Hitler Youth expounding military prowess as a sort of hobby (Johnson and Reiband p 56). All clubs of a private nature were brought under the control of anew organization which was called the KDF – Kraft durch Freude’ or Forcible Co-ordination Programme. This turned the Nazi Party into Germany’s largest organization with over 25 million members.
The Gleischaltung infiltrated every aspect of German social life and organized practically everything from holidays to vocational tournaments which were carried out on a vast scale. The governmental apparatus meant that the Governor of each state was responsible to the Ministry of the Interior which retained an iron grip on all that was going on. Spearheaded by Josef Goebbels, the ‘posion dwarf’, this ministry was in complete control of every single aspect of Germany right until the very end of the war thus showing that Gleischaltung was a huge success with no German ever daring to make his/her voice heard.
With laws promulgating the Nazi Party as the only legal political party, the first Gleischaltung law in early 1933 ensured that all other political parties had to dissolve or face arrest and extinction. This gave rise to the first concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald, this system was to grow to almost unimaginable proportions and become a factory of death some years later.
With these laws, state governments were given greater power and Hitler continued to consolidate his power with the Night of the Long Knives where all those who were averse to him were forcibly removed in a sort of coup. This incident continued to accelerate the consolidation of power by Hitler and he was then free to attack the Jews. The ostracization of the Jews began with the Nuremberg Laws in 1936 followed by the Kristallnacht in 1938. The creation of the Volksgemeinschaft was thus complete and the dictator’s power over all of Germany was absolute with the resultant consequences.
- Were the Nazis "modern"? Would you consider them modernist or modernizers? You could argue that they were one of these, both, or neither.
Although the Nazis were initially described as social conservatives they could also be described as modern in the way they renovated the state apparatus. In fact according to sociologists Ralf Dahrendorf and David Schoenbaum, the Nazis vastly improved the economy of Germany by launching vast public sector projects which further served to achieve their political goals of economic and cultural hegemony. Thus the Nazis were very modern in the productive sense of the word. They could be considered as modernizers due to the fact that they embarked on a wholesale modernization of the Germany industry and its economy (Fritzsche p 100).
However this ‘modernization’ obviously came at a price. The Nazis did not want to create a liberal republic; rather they wanted to mobilize the German citizen into an increasingly subservient individual which would be part of a collective group swearing total allegiance to the Fuhrer. This meant that they were interested in destroying the foundations of those institutions which had a certain form of authority such as the military, the aristocracy and the Prussian military machine. They also set about removing all political and cultural allegiances such as those to the Catholic Church and other cultural subgroups such as the socialists. The Nazis also undermined the importance of the family which was seen as a traditionalist form of social cohesion and which interfered in their goal of creating social hegemony.
In other aspects such as culture, the Nazis were definitely not modern. They viewed modern art particularly that created by Jewish artists as degenerate and burned large quantities of books which they believed were poisonous to their ideal of cultural progressivism.
However it was national mobilization which really fitted the German picture of total social control and hegemony. One also has to remember that the Nazi government included six years of total war which were extremely hard and very difficult making Germans interact as individuals rather than in groups. So the Germans were living according to the established standards of a mobile, achievement-oriented consumer society quite different to the habits and customs of more established social orders. Although it has been argued by Dahrendorf that the Nazis did not effectively manage to break down social barriers and class divisions, the regime still reshaped the manner in which people thought about them in a big way. Still, the modernization of German society was not actually an intended project but was rather an unintended consequence of the blood and soil dreams. This aspect was inherently backward but the war then changed all the aspects of social cohesion in a big way since this was uniquely, a fight for survival.
However modernization, as with everything else under the Nazis came at a price. The destruction of the family unit and the elimination of the Jews was in complete contradiction to what the individual intended to achieve. Some historians such as Rainer Zitelmann and Michael Prinz sought to actively fashion a much more modern Germany which sowed the seeds of the Federal Republic which came later. These roots could be seen in the social welfare planning and economic rationalization introduced by the Nazis that brought about far greater social mobility. The technocratic leadership of the Nazis and their investment in large modernist public works projects such as the autobahn system and Albert Speer’s grandiose buildings were certainly one important aspect of the modernist side of Nazism in Germany.