Nazi Germany

This volume presents an up-to-date and authoritative introduction to the history of Nazi Germany, including ten chapters on the most important themes in the history of National Socialism, each by an expert in the field familiar with the most recent research. Following an introduction which sets out the challenges this period of history has posed to historians since 1945, contributors explain how Nazism emerged as ideology and political movement; how Hitler and his party took power and remade the German state; and how the Nazi 'national community' was organized around a radical and eventually lethal distinction between the 'included' and the 'excluded'. Further chapters discuss the complex relationship between Nazism and Germany's religious faiths; the perverse economic rationality of the regime; the path to war laid down by Hitler's foreign policy; and the intricate and intimate intertwining of war and genocide. A final chapter is devoted to the aftermath of National Socialism in postwar German history and memory.