Professor Nick Stargardt

Professor of Modern European History

Magdalen College

Director of Graduate Studies

01865 (2)76074

nick.stargardt@magd.ox.ac.uk

See page on Magdalen College website

Research
Publications

Wartime occupation by Germany: food and sex

Chapter
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The Cambridge History Of The Second World War
The Volk at war: What were Germans fighting for in the Second World War

2017
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Chapter
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Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany
The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–45

2015
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Book

And when did Germans first realise that they were fighting a genocidal war? Drawing on a wealth of first-hand testimony, The German War is the first foray for many decades into how the German people experienced the Second World War.

History
For Führer and Fatherland: The German war, 1939-1945

2013
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Book

History
La dernière armée d’Hitler: adolescents allemands pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale

2012
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Chapter
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L'enfant soldat. XIX-XXIe siècle. Une approche critique

Objet de toutes les attentions des instances internationales et humanitaires, l’enfant-soldat est une figure incontournable dans la réflexion sur le phénomène guerrier actuel. À ce premier archétype est fréquemment associé un continent, l’Afrique. Le recours à des enfants raptés, exploités, abusés, drogués parfois, apparaît comme un sommet d'horreur et heurte les consciences. Bousculant les stéréotypes, ce livre remonte aux origines de la guerre moderne, en passant par les guerres mondiales, d’un continent à l’autre, pour livrer une analyse fouillée de la figure de l’enfant-soldat et de ses représentations. Le recours aux autres sciences humaines et sociales (sociologie, science politique, anthropologie) lui permet de s’émanciper d’une vision purement historique, afin de saisir la dimension contemporaine de ce phénomène dans toute sa complexité.
Hitler’s Last Army: German teenagers in the Second World War

2012
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Chapter
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L’enfant-combattant: XIXe-XXIe siècle, pratiques et représentations
Beyond 'consent' or 'terror': Wartime crises in Nazi Germany

2011
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Journal article
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History Workshop Journal

Nicholas Stargardt addresses the question of the remarkable resilience of the German state and society during the Second World War. Like Italy, German cities were subjected to massive Allied air raids from 1942 onwards, but there was no German equivalent to the strike-wave that swept northern and central Italy in the spring of 1943, and it is this comparison which is the starting point for Nicholas Stargardt’s analysis of how German society coped with the crises of this period. He argues that it was that society’s capacity to recover from crises which made it possible for the regime to go on fighting the war till the end. He proposes that the dynamic quality of these crises takes us beyond the conventional explanations of state-society in terms of coercion and consent, and into an exploration of the transformation of subjectivities and social values, in particular the moral and psychological power of fear and hope.
Clausewitz’s Final Posting

2011
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Chapter
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Gewalt und Gesellschaft: Klassiker modernen Denkens neu gelesen
Children

2010
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Chapter
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Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies

This article explores how historians, at least since the late 1980s, have subjected the experience of children to more searching analysis, without making their fate any less shocking. Nazism had a special interest in children, both in shaping the next generation of German children and in eliminating the offspring of Jews, Sinti, Roma, and other so-called degenerates. At every stage of persecution, children were targeted in specific ways, from ‘Jew benches’ in schools, through the medical killing of children in psychiatric asylums, to selection in the death camps. Children, however, were anything but passive victims. New research has revealed much about their experience of ghettoization, in particular their adeptness at smuggling, hiding, and adopting new identities, languages, and religious beliefs.
The Troubled Patriot: German Innerlichkeit in World War II

2010
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Journal article
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German History

How German society responded to the Holocaust, military defeat, Allied bombing and the mass flights from the Eastern territories in 1945 needs to be seen in relation to the larger question of morale and attitudes towards the continuation of the war per se. Any attempt to assess German morale inevitably involves psychological and emotional analyses, and this article explores how these issues operated at the level of individual subjectivity. It focuses on the personal diary of August Töpperwien, a German Protestant, who was not a Nazi and yet maintained a loyal patriotism to the end. In so doing, it probes the troubled conscience of someone whose conflicting senses of personal duty and political obligation found their vent in pages of silent self-reflection, and so reveal with an unusual clarity the underlying frames of moral reference, which so often remain implicit and unargued in the short-hand and commonsense of other diaries and family letters, let alone macro-level surveys of popular opinion. Many historians have followed the lead of Martin Broszat and accepted that, after the Battle of Stalingrad, German society was increasingly alienated not only by the demands of the Nazi regime but by the war itself, and retreated into privacy. Careful reading of a diary such as this one reveals that support for the Nazi regime and for the war were not the same thing, and questions how much interiority remained untouched by the emotional and moral claims of war. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved.