History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
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Item Engineering Consent: Peenemuende, National Socialism, and the V-2 Missile, 1924-1945(2005-09-02) Petersen, Michael Brian; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: ENGINEERING CONSENT: PEENEMUENDE, NATIONAL SOCIALISM, AND THE V-2 MISSILE, 1924-1945 Michael Brian Petersen, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation Directed By: Professor Jeffrey Herf Department of History This dissertation is the story of the German scientists and engineers who developed, tested, and produced the V-2 missile, the world's first liquid-fueled ballistic missile. It examines the social, political, and cultural roots of the program in the Weimar Republic, the professional world of the Peenemünde missile base, and the results of the specialists' decision to use concentration camp slave labor to produce the missile. Previous studies of this subject have been the domain of either of sensationalistic journalists or the unabashed admirers of the German missile pioneers. Only rarely have historians ventured into this area of inquiry, fruitfully examining the history of the German missile program from the top down while noting its administrative battles and technical development. However, this work has been done at the expense of a detailed examination of the mid and lower-level employees who formed the backbone of the research and production effort. This work addresses that shortcoming by investigating the daily lives of these employees and the social, cultural, and political environment in which they existed. It focuses on the key questions of dedication, motivation, and criminality in the Nazi regime by asking "How did Nazi authorities in charge of the missile program enlist the support of their employees in their effort?" "How did their work translate into political consent for the regime?" "How did these employees come to view slave labor as a viable option for completing their work?" This study is informed by traditions in European intellectual and social history while borrowing from different methods of sociology and anthropology. I argue that a web of professional ambition, internal dynamics, military pressure, and fear coalesced in this project. The interaction of these forces made the rapid development of the V-2 possible, but also contributed to an environment in which terrible crimes could be committed against concentration camp prisoners in the name of defending National Socialist Germany.Item Rise of the Cult of Will: Ethics and the Search for Meaning in Germany, 1870-1936(2004-11-23) Kurtz, Angela Astoria; Harris, James F.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation traces the history of a secular ethics movement in Germany whose practitioners sought to solve a widely perceived moral crisis in the late nineteenth century. Although extant in all western countries, the ethics debate in Germany distinguished itself by what became an all-consuming preoccupation with the human will. The German ethics movement was consequently exemplary, I argue, of a German intellectual Sonderweg. That said, the movement itself was not monolithic, but divided into two antagonistic camps. One camp championed the individual will (and thus, individual moral conscience) as the ultimate source of moral values whereas the other camp insisted on the moral authority of a purportedly "collective" will. My dissertation analyzes the lives and works of two leaders of the movement: psychologist Wilhelm Wundt and sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. And it concludes with a discussion of the movement's transformation into a "cult," which dictated collective submission to the will of a supreme leader, as it spread to ever more popular, less rarefied segments of the German people. This "collectivist" strain, represented by Wundt, came to predominate in World War I, driving the "individualist" variant, exemplified by Tönnies, underground and out of view. The Nazi regime later coopted the new faith, presenting Hitler as the embodiment of the will of the German people. Much of the popular euphoria which greeted the Nazis, I argue, had to do with the Germans' perception that their deliverance from existential pain and uncertainty had finally arrived, a perception born of an inversion of values rendered palatable by a body of scholarship originally intended as a blueprint for social comity.