The Third Reich: Terror, Complicity and Resistance

Description

HIST281 offers students the opportunity to examine how the Third Reich came to power and why it unleashed a genocidal war that both killed 55 million people, including six million Jews, and led to its own destruction. The course’s purpose is also to assess how ordinary Germans responded to Nazism in their daily lives and to ask crucial questions, such as, the extent to which the regime was genuinely popular or dependent on terror to create conformity and consent.

The first twelve lectures provide a detailed overview of the Nazi ascendancy to power and the functioning of the Nazi State, including its terror apparatus, economy, and racial policies. The second half of the course assesses the responses of groups and institutions, including workers, women, young people, and the churches, to the Third Reich before focusing on the war, genocide, resistance, and German defeat. HIST281 also seeks to introduce students to key historiographical debates in the field and to equip them to work extensively with primary sources, which offer an understanding of what Germans thought of the Nazis and how they experienced the Third Reich.