Professor%20Nick%20Stargardt: List of publications

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.

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.

This volume brings together leading international historians to address the manifold issues raised in his landmark history of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945.

The concept of generation is ubiquitous in common parlance and public discourse: it is used to explain family relationships, consumer preferences, political change, and much else besides. But how can generation be used by historians? Do generations really exist, or are they constructed and manipulated by social and cultural elites? In pursuit of answers to these questions, this book ranges from World War I to the baby boomers and from Spain to the Soviet Union.

A groundbreaking study of what happened to children—of all nationalities and religions—living under the Nazi regime. Drawing on a wide range of new sources, Witnesses of War reveals the stories of life under the Third Reich as never before. As the Nazis overran Europe, children were saved or damned according to their race. Turning to an untouched wealth of original material—school assignments; juvenile diaries; letters; and even accounts of children’s games—Nicholas Stargardt breaks stereotypes of victimhood and trauma to give us the gripping individual stories of the generation Hitler made.

The period from defeat in the First World War to defeat in the Second World War saw Germany experience two political extremes: its first attempt at democracy, with the abdication of the Kaiser and the proclamation of a republic on 9 November 1918, and one of the most reprehensible dictatorships of the modern age, following the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor on 30 January 1933. With the unleashing of a second world war, and the purposeful mass murder of around six million human beings in unprecedented industrial genocide, the collapse from democracy into dictatorship has understandably aroused the most virulent historical controversies. The years since 1945 have to an extent been lived in the shadow of the earlier period, but also of course in their own right with their own peculiarities, none more pronounced than the creation of two Germanies, the Frg and Gdr, one democracy, one dictatorship, ideological foes in the Cold War. The controversies attaching to the later period are (as yet?) less heated but the questions are no less insistent.