Nazi Propaganda Through Art and Architecture: Creating the Myth of Hitler’s Third Reich

Arts & Photography

Ridley, Norman

History & Criticism

Frontline Books

During WWII, Heinrich Himmler's murder squads, the Einsatzgruppen, carried out mass executions in the Baltic states that significantly altered the Holocaust. During the Second World War, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were occupied on three separate occasions - twice by the Soviet Union and once by Nazi Germany. The signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939 allowed the Soviets to dominate the Baltic states without fear of German reprisals, causing many in the German-Baltic populations to flee to Poland. Soviet rule of the Baltics was brutal with the purging of political elites and deportation of many tens of thousands in a bid to turn them into vassal states. Consequently, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, many Balts saw it as a liberation from Soviet cruelties. The reality was, however, that it turned out to be the beginning of something much worse. During their occupation of Poland prior to Barbarossa the Nazis had decimated the Polish political elites, and the Jews there had been herded into ghettos in preparation for deportation to the east where they would serve as slave labour in the Nazi economy after the conquest of the Soviet Union. Similar policies were to be adopted in the Baltics when Heinrich Himmler's murder squads, the Einsatzgruppen, were allowed to move into the newly-occupied territories. Operating behind the advancing German forces Einsatzgruppen A, B, C, and D - four special mobile killing units, each made up of about a thousand men from the security police and the German intelligence service - proved to be more than willing to carry out Himmler's orders. He had called for the removal of every vestige of opposition to Nazi rule, which primarily meant complete elimination of the 'inferior' races who were unfit for work and the ghettoization of others in preparation for their economic exploitation. On foreign soil, away from scrutiny and free of all constraint, the Einsatzgruppen discovered that through the mass shootings of communists, Jews and gypsies it was possible to accelerate the pace of the Holocaust, slaughtering men, women and children in their tens of thousands. The Einsatzgruppen were assisted by local 'volunteers' who helped to identify victims as well as kill them; in places whole Jewish communities were swiftly eliminated. Many of the killers and victims had known one another as neighbors and colleagues. This massive slaughter of civilians convinced Heydrich and Himmler that complete extermination of Jews was within their grasp and before very long, in the death camps, new industrial methods of killing would be devised.

The Horror of Himmler’s Death Squads: The Einsatzgruppen and the Holocaust in the Baltics

History

Military

In many countries around the world, the end of the First World War, far from leading to a new world order of stability, ushered in an era of uncertainty and economic decline. To solve the problems of unemployment, high inflation, low wages and poor working conditions, many turned to the political right for a solution - to leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler. But it was not only in countries such as Italy and Germany that people saw fascism as an alternative to democracy. It is sometimes said fascism in America first manifested itself as a reaction by a native-born population to the surge in the numbers of European immigrants in 1830. It went on to find a voice at least another four times up to the outbreak of the Second World War, most obviously in the formation of the German American Bund. American politicians and commentators have traditionally avoided applying the label of 'fascist' to any movement, preferring instead to describe extreme right-wing groups as 'nativist', money-making rackets exploiting gullible followers, or simply the 'lunatic fringe'. For many years this denied them the opportunity to examine the possibility that American fascist ideologies or social structures were rooted in patterns of the American past, as opposed to being a foreign import. The Ku Klux Klan has been described as the world's first fascist organization and this book looks at the arguments for and against that assertion. It also examines how the philosophy behind that movement remained as a potent undercurrent in American politics up to the start of the Second World War. There is also an examination of how American racial policies were used by the Nazis when drawing up their own. while argument persists over whether movements such as the Silver Shirts and the Friends of New Germany were truly fascist, it is undoubtedly the case that personalities behind them, individuals such as William Dudley Pelley and Father Charles Coughlin, exhibited all the classic characteristics of fascism. And they were by no means unpopular. A proponent of many of Hitler's policies, during the 1930s, when the US population was about 120 million, an estimated 30 million listeners, for example, tuned in to Coughlin's weekly radio program. This book compares the ways that both the United States and fascist regimes, especially that in Germany, tackled the immense social and economic problems resulting from the Great Depression. It also explores&nbsp;the way that European fascist regimes, especially that in Nazi Germany, tried to influence the American political process both legally and illegally and analyses the level of success they achieved in both.

Hitler's U.S. Allies: Americans Who Supported the Nazis

Americas

Review "...Ridley’s book goes some way to showing how what we might now call the 'cognitive dissonance' between the German military/political leadership and its intelligence product constituted not so much a failure of intelligence but was part of a grand strategic project that no amount of 'truth to power' telling intelligence was likely to alter."International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence Product Description The Battle of Britain was fought between two airborne military elites and was a classic example of pure attack against pure defense. Though it was essentially a ‘war of attrition’, it was an engagement in which the gathering, assessment and reaction to intelligence played a significant role on both sides.In some respects, both the RAF and the Luftwaffe were hamstrung in their endeavors during the Battle of Britain by poor intelligence. The most egregious Luftwaffe blunder was its failure to appreciate the true nature of Fighter Command’s operational systems and consequently it made fundamental strategic errors when evaluating its plans to degrade them. This was compounded by the Luftwaffe’s Intelligence chief, Major Josef ‘Beppo’ Schmid, whose consistent underestimation of Fighter Command’s capabilities had a huge negative impact upon Reichsmarschall Göring’s decision-making at all stages of the conflict.Both the Luftwaffe and the RAF lacked detailed information about each other’s war production capacity. While the Luftwaffe did have the benefit of pre-war aerial surveillance data it had been unable to update it significantly since the declaration of war in September 1939. Fighter Command did have an distinct advantage through its radar surveillance systems, but this was, in the early stages of the conflict at least, less than totally reliable and it was often difficult to interpret the data coming through due to the inexperience of many of its operators. Another promising source of intelligence was the interception of Luftwaffe communications.It is clear that the Luftwaffe was unable to use intelligence as a ‘force multiplier’, by concentrating resources effectively, and actually fell into a negative spiral where poor intelligence acted as a ‘force diluter’, thus wasting resources in strategically questionable areas. The British, despite being essentially unable to predict enemy intentions, did have the means, however imperfect, to respond quickly and effectively to each new strategic initiative rolled out by the Luftwaffe.The result of three years intensive research, in this book the author analyses the way in which both the British and German Intelligence services played a part in the Battle of Britain, thereby attempting to throw light on an aspect of the battle that has been hitherto underexposed to scrutiny. About the Author Norman Ridley is an Open University Honours graduate and a writer on inter-war intelligence. He lives in the Channel Islands.

The Role of Intelligence in the Battle of Britain

Air World

Following the end of the First World War, many countries experienced economic decline. Unemployment, high inflation, low wages and poor working conditions led to widespread unrest. This manifested itself in the rise of powerful militaristic leaders, first in Italy where fascism was born, and then in Germany and elsewhere. The policies of the likes of Mussolini and Hitler were hugely popular, and fascism was seen by many as a viable political alternative to democracy.To some degree, these ideals also gained traction in the UK where some individuals in and among the elite of British society believed fascism was the way forward for the country. This is fully explored in Hitler's British Nazis which traces the evolution of extreme right-wing opinion from the turn of the century right through to the end of the Second World War. In particular it looks at the way British fascism developed its own character due to Britain having been on the winning side during the First World War.Early fascist movements of the 1920s are analysed including the fascist tendencies of the Suffragette Movement. The book then traces the way in which domestic politics and the dire economic situation of the early 1930s created a political vacuum that was filled by Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirt Movement.Throughout the 1930s right-wing sympathisers looked to Hitler's Germany rather than to Mussolini's Italy for inspiration. Some members of aristocratic and political elites, many with virulent anti-Semitic views, saw in German fascism a template for Britain to build on but remained wilfully blind to the excesses of the Nazi regime that were getting worse by the day.The book looks at the way in which Nazi Germany was depicted in the press and how powerful press barons, many of whom were pro-German and supported Chamberlain's appeasement policies, were able to influence public opinion.The role of the Mitford sisters, Unity in particular, is explored in detail as is the influence of the Cliveden Set under the leadership of the Astors and perhaps most interesting of all is the role played by King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson as they flirted unashamedly with fascism and threatened to take Britain down a very different path to that which it took after the abdication.

Hitler's British Nazis: The Hidden Story of the Fascist Movement in the UK

Europe

On 19 December 1938, Otto Hahn, working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, conducted an experiment the results of which baffled him. It took his émigré collaborator Lise Meitner to explain that he had split an atom of uranium, which at the time seemed to defy all known laws of physics. When Neils Bohr took this news to the United States it became clear to scientists there that these results opened a completely new and, for some, horrifying possibility of energy production that could be used for both peaceful and military purposes.Scientists in Germany, France, Britain and the US began to delve deeper into the implications. But it was the British government that was the first to explicitly describe how the splitting of the atom might be utilized to create a practical weapon of fearsome power.France, by then, had been occupied by the Germans and most of their nuclear scientists had fled to Britain. For their part, the Germans, who for a time were at the very forefront of nuclear research, had weakened their own scientific ranks by hounding many of their best scientists who had fled persecution under the draconian Nazi racial laws. They still retained, however, possibly the ablest nuclear scientist of them all in Werner Heisenberg who set about developing his own program for nuclear power.British scientists made extensive progress before realizing that translating their laboratory results into the vast industrial enterprise required to build a bomb was way beyond the nation's stretched resources. The government agreed to hand over all the UK's research findings to America in return for a share of the spoils. The United States, for its part, was impressed with British results and invested enormous sums of money and resources into what became known as the Manhattan Project in a concerted effort to build a bomb before the end of the war.For much of the war the Soviets showed little enthusiasm for the sort of investment required to build their own bomb. However, with an eye to the future they established an extensive espionage network both in Britain and America.Following the German surrender there was still the problem of Japan, and the race continued to develop a working bomb to accelerate the end of the war, both to save Allied lives and to prevent Soviet expansion into northern China and the Japanese mainland. It was a race that the Unites States won. It was also a race that ushered in a new Cold War.

The Race for the Atomic Bomb: Scientists, Spies and Saboteurs – The Allies’ and Hitler’s Battle for the Ultimate Weapon

Hitler and Poland: How the Independence of one Country led the World to War in 1939

War is a costly business and in 1939, Germany was almost broke with its economy overheating and heading for runaway inflation. Hitler needed hard foreign currency to pay for his war machine and the only way he could get this was by selling gold that he looted from the national banks of Austria, Czechoslovakia and all the countries that were occupied after September 1939.Another source of gold was the theft of personal gold especially from the Jews, most grotesquely, the haul of dental gold which came out of the concentration camps.No neutral country would accept Reichsmarks so the gold had to be laundered through Swiss banks. The story of Swiss complicity in German war crimes is still a subject of controversy, and lawsuits. There are also questions about the parts played by other countries, particularly Portugal, in laundering stolen gold for the Nazis. The Vatican's dealings with Hitler have often been seen as ambiguous and this book investigates the Holy See's role in helping ship Nazi gold to South America, and how that gold might have been used to re-create the German Reich.After the war a commission was set up to recover as much gold as possible and restore it to those from whom it was stolen. This, of course, was beset by huge problems especially with regards to gold that was looted from Holocaust victims. Enormous quantities of gold and other treasures were hidden in a mine at Merkers in Thuringia which was found by the US 3rd Army in 1945, but much gold remains unaccounted for, and attempts are still ongoing to uncover supposed hidden caches, the most recent in Poland where four tons are believed to have been found by the Silesian Bridge Foundation in May of 2022.The whereabouts and disposal of the remaining stolen gold has led to numerous investigations and countless conspiracy theories. In Hitler's Gold the author analyzes these and uncovers many of the mysteries surrounding this continuing search for the missing millions.

Hitler's Gold: The Nazi Loot and How it was Laundered and Lost

The First World War had seen the mechanization of warfare. Battle fronts had become immobilized in the grip of machine-guns and heavy artillery, leading to slaughter on an unprecedented scale.\nThe end of the war saw exhausted governments extricating themselves from the carnage, but some leaders were concerned that, sooner or later, another major war would follow. As France’s Marshal Foch put it, the Treaty of Versailles was only a ‘twenty-year truce’. The overriding concern was to find ways in future of avoiding the kind of static battle fronts that had consumed so many in such futile efforts.\nMilitary aviation was seen as the one great innovation that had the potential to do this by revolutionizing warfare. It would not only augment the effectiveness of ground forces in a tactical role, but it also had the means of reaching out strategically beyond the battlefronts to strike at the enemy’s trade, supplies, communications and industrial production. All through the war, military aviation had been firmly under the control of army commanders but there was soon a fierce debate over the way it should develop. The development of an ‘air doctrine’ within each of the major European powers was fraught with difficulty as the nascent air arms struggled, with varying degrees of success, to free themselves from army control to find a new, independent identity.\nThis book examines the way in which these air arms competed for prominence within the military structures of six major European nations – Germany, Britain, France, Soviet Union, Poland and Italy – with different resources, ambitions and philosophies, in the years from the beginning of aviation right up to the start of the Second World War.

Military Air Power in Europe Preparing for War: A Study of European Nations’ Air Forces Leading up to 1939

From the chaos of the First World War, during which Germany and Russia had fought each other to a standstill, there emerged two societies whose diametrically opposed ideologies of communism and fascism represented the opposite extremes of the political spectrum. Despite this, in time the governments and military establishments in both countries were able to create an environment where political expediency led to both cooperation and an eventual alliance.\nWestern democracies found both systems repellent but the two countries, Germany and the Soviet Union, embodied vast resources of, in the case of the Soviets, raw materials and, in the case of Germany, huge intellectual, scientific and industrial expertise. Both offered massive opportunities for trade, but neither made comfortable partners. Britain, whose sympathies lay more with the Germans, and France, whose history tied them more to Eastern Europe, tended to treat both Germany and the Soviet Union as outcast states. This created a great deal of animosity in return and ultimately drove the outcasts into each other’s arms.\nwhile animosity was rampant on a political level, both countries, now having equal pariah status in the eyes of the Western allies, began to see huge benefits in military and economic cooperation. Collaborative ventures for covert armament production and training facilities were initiated in 1921. These schemes would continue, with varying degrees of success, for more than a decade until the rise of Nazism in Germany put an end to it.\nThe Spanish Civil War saw not only the two rival political philosophies but opposing military doctrines also being tested against each other on the field of battle. It is remarkable, therefore, that these two nations emerged from this maelstrom to rediscover the ‘spirit of Rapallo’. It was a spirit which culminated in the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939. Within weeks, both sides would display their unity as they fell together with ruthless efficiency upon the hapless Poland.\nThis book looks at how these two ‘strange bedfellows’ dealt with western hostility and found ways to accommodate each other in a bid to recover from the economic devastation and dismantling of their historic territorial boundaries. The extent to which cooperation was achieved is unusual given the circumstances, especially as they had to contend with the machinations of the Western Powers. The era of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact proved to be a brief liaison, one that collapsed into savagery again when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa just a few months later.

The Road to Barbarossa: Soviet-German Relations, 1917–1941

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ridley, Norman. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ridley, Norman