History Theses and Dissertations
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Item The Price of Reconciliation: West Germany, France and the Arc of Postwar Justice for the Crimes of Nazi Germany, 1944-1963(2020) Staedtler, Rene; Herf, Jeffrey C; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation links the arc of war crimes justice with the arc of reconciliation in Franco-German relations from 1944 to 1963. I argue that France initially created a retributive justice which aggressively targeted crimes committed by the German occupant from 1940 to 1944. By examining the internal debates within the French government and parliament regarding the legal foundation of Nazi war crimes trials in France, I show that the French polity dispensed with and even violated the French republican tradition in its effort to reckon with the Nazi past. In the second part, I demonstrate that the process of European integration and Franco-German reconciliation offered those in West Germany who resented the retributive justice in France the opportunity to influence, even manipulate the French government by initiating and sustaining a trajectory which bound reconciliation ever more tightly to the retreat from the goals of postwar justice. I contend that once French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman initiated the path towards reconciliation with Adenauer’s West Germany, a broad coalition centrally coordinated from Bonn utilized the desire for rapprochement to undermine French war crimes justice. By attacking French justice as a sign of its unforgiveness and its resolve to continue with the so-called “arch-enmity,” the West German diplomats and government officials argued that the war crimes trials were regarded as a symbol of a period of humiliation and injustice which needed to be eradicated in order to achieve a “veritable reconciliation.” I show how the reconciliation narrative shaped the transition from a French system of justice which was one of the most extensive and consequential ones in Western Europe in the late 1940s to the complete and premature release of all remaining war criminals in French custody. The West German view prevailed and imprinted on the landmark achievement of Franco-German reconciliation the stain of privileging the perpetrators over the victims of Nazi Germany in France.Item Someone Else's Textbooks: German Education 1945-2014(2016) Abney, Ann; Kosicki, Piotr; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 20th century, German education repeatedly transformed as the occupying Americans, Soviets, and western-dominated reunification governments used their control of the German secondary education system to create new definitions of what it meant to be German. In each case, the dominant political force established the paradigm for a new generation of Germans. The victors altered the German education system to ensure that their versions of history would be the prevailing narrative. In the American Occupation Zones from 1945-1949, this meant democratic initiatives; for the Soviet Zone in those same years, Marxist-Leninist pedagogy; and for the Bundesrepublik after reunification, integrated East and West German narratives. In practice, this meant succeeding generations of German students learned very different versions of history depending on the temporal and geographic space they inhabited, as each new prevailing regime supplanted the previous version of “Germanness” with its own.Item Culture Wars and Contested Identities: Social Policy and German Nationalisms in Interwar Slovenia, 1918-1941(2013) Reul, Nathaniel; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis analyzes the nature of ethnic Germans' self-identities and nationalisms in interwar Slovenia. Slovenia's German minorities' reactions to domestic social policies and world events that impacted them are examined primarily through locally-based German-language newspapers. Germans in Slovenia had had multiple identities and nationalisms, and these were shaped by social policies and domestic and foreign events, especially after the National Socialists' seizure of power in Germany in 1933. Pan-German nationalism was strong and widespread, and viewed Slovene minority policies as being purposeful attempts to eradicate the very existence of Germandom. This type of nationalism competed with other types of German nationalisms and identities which sought to integrate into and contribute to Slovene society without compromising their uniquely Germanic culture. National Socialism's appeal was so strong because it promised a reunion of Slovenia's Germandom with the wider Volk and a restoration of the minorities' societal dominance in the region.Item "Founding a Heavenly Empire": Protestant Missionaries and German Colonialism, 1860-1919(2012) Best, Jeremy; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates the relationship between German Protestant missionaries and secular leaders of colonial politics and culture in the German colonial empire during the nineteenth century. In particular, it examines how missionaries defined their collective identity as an international one against pressures that encouraged mission societies to adopt and promote policies that favored the German colonial state and German colonial economic actors. Protestant missionaries in Germany created an alternative ideology to govern Germans' and Germany's relationships with the wider world. The dissertation examines the formation of an internationalist missionary methodology and ideology by German missionary intellectuals from 1870 and the shift to traditional Protestant nationalism during World War I. It then examines the application by missionaries of this ideology to the major issues of Protestant mission work in German East Africa: territorial rivalries with German Catholic mission orders, mission school policy, fundraising in the German metropole, and international missionary cooperation. In so doing, it revises conventional interpretations about the relationship between Protestantism and nationalism in Germany during this period.Item German Radio Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A War of Words(2012) Butsavage, Christopher James; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The focus of this study is the content of Nazi radio propaganda to and concerning the Soviet Union. The radio was a new and innovative means for the Nazi regime to directly communicate with the masses of illiterate civilians in the Soviet Union on a daily basis. This study finds that as the war in the east progressed, there was an increasingly stark dichotomy between the positive messages found within German radio propaganda and the harsh reality of the Nazi occupation. It seems almost as though there was a morbid inverse correlation between the amount of violence the Germans inflicted upon civilians (including forcibly sending them to work in Germany) and the amount of radio propaganda exhorting these same civilian populations to join the Nazi cause. It is also important to note that every German radio broadcast to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was not propaganda. In fact, by 1943, a great deal of news items broadcast on German radio in occupied territory were administrative in nature. Announcements such as local curfews, blackouts, conscription and mobilization decrees, and warnings were frequently broadcast.Item After Empire: Ethnic Germans and Minority Nationalism in Interwar Yugoslavia(2008-11-30) Lyon, Philip; Lampe, John R; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study traces the (ethnically German) Danube Swabians' embrace of national identity in interwar Yugoslavia with attention to the German national movement's antecedents in Croatia-Slavonia and Vojvodina under the Habsburgs. We examine the important role of German national activists in Yugoslavia and survey the institutions they built to stimulate, shape and mobilize Yugoslavia's German population as a specifically national minority based on the Swabians' history and collective memory as colonists in the region. Thereafter, we discuss the rift that emerged inside the German minority during the 1930s, when the German leadership and its conservative variety of German nationalism were confronted by brash, young challengers who sought to "renew" the German minority in a Nazi image. These young enthusiasts for National Socialism directed their extreme nationalism not at the repressive Yugoslav authorities, but rather at their older rivals in the Germans' main cultural and political organization, the Kulturbund. German culture and national authenticity became key criteria for German leadership in this struggle to control the Kulturbund. Meanwhile, German Catholic priests also resisted the Nazi-oriented Erneuerungsbewegung insurgency. Ultimately, we see in this clash of generations both support for and resistance to local manifestations of Nazism in Southeastern Europe. One of this study's major finds is the stubborn endurance of national indifference and local identity in Southeastern Europe throughout interwar period, when national identity was supposed to be dominant. Many Germans embraced national identity, but certainly not all of them. The persistence of this indifference confounded the logic of twentieth century nationalists, for whom national indeterminacy seemed unnatural, archaic, and inexplicable. Even after years of effort by German nationalist activists in the nationalized political atmosphere of interwar Yugoslavia, some ethnic Germans remained indifferent to national identity or else identified as Croats or Magyars. There were also those who pined for Habsburg Hungary, which had offered a dynastic alternative to national identity before 1918. Still others' identity remained shaped by confession as Catholic or Protestant. We conclude therefore by observing the paradoxical situation whereby Nazi-oriented extreme nationalism coexisted with instances of German national indifference in Yugoslavia until the eve of the Second World War.Item Creating Deterrence for Limited War: The U.S. Army and the Defense of West Germany, 1953-1982(2006-04-06) Trauschweizer, Ingo; Sumida, Jon T.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation addresses the role of the U.S. Army as an instrument of national and alliance strategy in the era of the Cold War. The army was confronted with the fundamental question of its utility in the nuclear age. This dissertation argues that after the Korean War army leaders pursued a consistent policy to create a force that could deter limited, i.e., conventional and tactical-nuclear war in Central Europe. This policy resulted in a three-decade long transition process, as the army had to respond to influences ranging from the Soviet threat to inter-service rivalry, budgetary concerns, rapidly evolving technology, and military and political developments in Europe and Asia. The transition process occurred in three stages. First, army leaders redefined the mission of their institution from war-fighting to the deterrence of war. Then, the structure of combat divisions was altered to reflect the requirements of nuclear as well as conventional battlefields. Finally, and only after the Vietnam War, doctrine was introduced that combined specific objectives in Central Europe, modern divisional structure, weapons technology, and newly defined principles of operational art in a coherent system of air and land warfare. At the heart of the dissertation rests the question of strategic decision-making and the impact of military institutions. But it also addresses NATO's military and political capabilities and considers the effect of nuclear weapons on land warfare and the deterrence of war. Moreover, it is a study of civil-military relations in the United States. Finally, it offers a fresh view of the Vietnam War by placing both the periphery and center of the Cold War in the context of potentially devastating nuclear war. Scholarship of the Cold War to date has emphasized the effects of nuclear deterrence and neglected the contribution of ground forces to the prevention of war. This dissertation is based on archival research in Europe and the United States, including the archives of NATO and the German military, the U.S. National Archives, the National Security Archive, several presidential libraries, and other major repositories of manuscripts of diplomats, military officers, and political leaders.Item Walter Lippmann, Strategic Internationalism, the Cold War, and Vietnam, 1943-1967(2004-08-06) Wasniewski, Matthew A.; Zhang, Shu Guang; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the Cold War writings and activities of the American commentator Walter Lippmannin particular his observations about U.S. policy in Vietnam. Lippmann was the preeminent columnist of his era, writing 2,300 installments of his Today and Tomorrow column between 1945 and 1967. Lippmann crafted a conceptual framework for promoting American internationalism that blended political realism, cosmopolitanism, and classical diplomacy. That approach shaped his role as a moderator of the domestic and international dialogue about the Cold War, as a facilitator of ideas and policies, and as a quasi-diplomat. Chapter one suggests that based on new archival sources a re-evaluation of Lippmann is necessary to correct inadequacies in the standard literature. Chapter two surveys his strategic internationalist approach to foreign affairs from the publication of his first foreign policy book in 1915 to three influential volumes he wrote between 1943 and 1947. Chapter three explores Lippmann's position on a prominent and controversial Cold War issuethe partition of Germany. Chapter four makes a comparative analysis of Lippmann with the French commentator Raymond Aron, examining Lippmann's part as a dialogue-shaper and public broker during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the subsequent debate about nuclear sharing in the Atlantic Alliance. Chapter five moves the study toward his writings on U.S. policy in Asiaparticularly U.S.-China policy and the Korean War. Chapter six examines Lippmann's analyses of U.S.-Vietnam policy from 1949 to 1963 framed by three consistent arguments: first, that America had no vital interests at stake there; second, that it could not win a military victory there at any reasonable cost; and, third, that its best course was to use diplomacy to promote Vietnamese neutralism. Chapter seven explores Lippmann's efforts to dissuade U.S. officials from intervention in 1964. Chapter eight details policymakers' elaborate efforts to delay Lippmann's public criticisms of the Vietnam policies. Chapter nine explores the Johnson administration's determination to discredit Lippmann's public criticisms of the war after July 1965. Chapter ten counters the standard literature's portrayal of Lippmann's Cold War commentary and suggests that his most influential activity as a public figure may have been as a quasi-diplomatist.Item THE WORLDVIEW OF FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: FRANCE, GERMANY, AND UNITED STATES INVOLVEMENT IN WORLD WAR II IN EUROPE(2004-04-30) Bell, Michael Stephen; Olson, Keith W.; HistoryPresident Franklin D. Roosevelt operated from a remarkably consistent view of the world that grew naturally from his experiences. Before he entered the White House, Roosevelt already possessed a coherent worldview that influenced his thinking and informed his decisions as president. The product of his background and education, his experiences, and his exposure to contemporary ideas, Roosevelt's worldview fully coalesced by the mid 1920s and provided a durable and coherent foundation for Roosevelt's thinking as president and his strategic direction in response to the deteriorating situation in Europe in the late 1930s and toward the Second World War. Roosevelt's "worldview" was his broad perspective and sweeping understanding of the impact and interplay of states, parties, groups, and individual people on the progressive advance of world civilization. His background and personal experiences, understanding of historical events, and ideology shaped Roosevelt's perspective and enabled him to formulate and deliberately pursue long-range strategic goals as part of his foreign policy. The foundation of Roosevelt's worldview was a progressive, liberal outlook that provided a durable basis for how he interpreted and responded to events at home and abroad. An essential aspect of that outlook was Roosevelt's deep conviction that he had a personal responsibility to advance civilization and safeguard the cause of liberal reform and democracy. He believed that he was an agent of progress. Examining several of Roosevelt's wartime policies within the context of his overall perspective allows new insights and a deeper appreciation for the depth and complexity of his thinking. As wartime leader, he remained focused on his fundamental strategic goals of defeating Nazi Germany and totalitarianism while crafting and implementing an enduring peace. As part of the enduring peace, he envisioned a postwar world marked by continued cooperation between the great powers, the reestablishment of republican France, and the revitalization of German liberalism.