Hitler Youth

The Nazis saw film as a major vehicle for both indoctrination and escapist pacification of the "masses"; in fact, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels tried to create a German counter-Hollywood. This highly acclaimed study, by one of Germany's leading commentators and authors on cultural policy, analyses the pictorial and spoken language of the various film genres in the Third Reich, including news reels, documentaries, feature and "cultural" films. It shows how a powerful and sinister propaganda machine emerged which, by deploying a wide range of psychological techniques, exerted a strong fascination on the masses. These methods were so successful that they continue to serve as models for totalitarian regimes to this day.

This collection presents a broad view of life in Nazi Germany, descriging how ordinary Germans perceived the policies and actions of the Third Reich, as well as how they lived their daily lives. Articles by noted historians provide fascinating insights into the character of the German people, describing such phenomena as the satisfaction German nationalists took in the orderliness of Hitler's takeover; the contradictory reactions of Germany's young people to the Nazi state; the power of Hitler's popular image, created by the new techniques of propaganda; and the way that Germans today regard their experiences under Hitler. Drawing these threads together, the book offers new perspectives on some of the most challenging questions of our time, and enriches our understanding of an awful chapter in German history.

This is a thematically arranged text illustrating popular resisitance to Nazism in Germany from 1930-1945, and the affect of Nazism on everyday life. The book combines a lucid, synthesized analysis together with a wide selection of integrated source material taken from pamphlets, diaries, recent oral testimonies, correspondence and more. Different chapters focus on social groups and activities, such as youth movements, religion, Jewish Germans, and the working classes.

No Heavenly Delusion? analyzes three movements of communal living, the Kibbutz, the Bruderhof and the Integrierte Gemeinde, all of which can trace their origins to the German Youth Movement of the first part of the twentieth century. The book looks at the alternative societies and economies the movements have created, their interactions with the wider world, and their redrawing of the boundaries of the public and private spheres of their members. The comparative approach taken allows a picture of dissimilarities and similarities to emerge that goes beyond merely obvious points of difference. Tyldesley places these movements in the context of intellectual trends in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and especially Germany, and enables the reader to evaluate their wider significance.