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Tag: Third Reich

‘Back to the Roofs’: The Spatial Propaganda of Munich’s Olympic Stadium

‘Back to the Roofs’: The Spatial Propaganda of Munich’s Olympic Stadium

Published September 29, 2022

Written by Peter Banks

From 11 to 21 August 2022, the multi-sport European Championships took place at Munich’s Olympic Park. Whilst this event occurs every four years, there is a particular historical resonance for this year’s championships for Munich, and Germany, as it coincides with the 50th anniversary of the 1972 Olympic Games held in Munich. Unfortunately, these Olympic Games will always be tainted by the terrorist attack carried out by the Palestinian group ‘Black September’ on the Israeli athletes in the Olympic village on 5 September 1972. However, the Munich games are also remembered and celebrated for how a new, democratic Germany was presented to the world only twenty-seven years after the end of the Second World War. Effectively utilised as a means of propaganda, the symbolic design of Munich’s Olympic stadium spatially exemplified this message and subsequently became a piece of iconic architecture. This is clearly illustrated by the slogan of this year’s European Championships, ‘Back to the Roofs’.

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Culture in the Third Reich

Culture in the Third Reich

Published February 9, 2022

Reviewed by Kate Docking

‘Culture’ is not something that instantly springs to mind when one thinks of the National Socialist regime. Indeed, images of relentless barbarism dominate our perceptions, and rightly so, for extreme cruelty was perpetuated during the Third Reich. However, the violence committed by the Nazis does not mean that there was a total dearth of culture. In fact, as Moritz Föllmer adeptly shows in his significant book, Culture in the Third Reich, ‘culture’ – which Föllmer defines in broad terms, encompassing not only ‘high culture’ such as opera but also ‘popular’ leisure pursuits including film, radio and light fiction – actually abounded under Nazism. Building on the work of historians such as George Mosse and Fritz Stern, Föllmer has produced the most insightful and comprehensive history of National Socialist culture to date. The broader scholarly importance of the book lies in Föllmer’s powerful argument that the ‘cultural attractiveness’ (p. 25) of Nazism significantly enabled the movement’s success.

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Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe

Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe

Published October 5, 2021

Review by David Peace

On 30 October 2020, in defiance of anti-COVID-19 measures to restrict public gatherings, over 100,000 mask-clad demonstrators took to the streets of Warsaw to protest proposed changes to Poland’s abortion laws. Only a few days earlier, on 22 October, Poland’s constitutional tribunal ruled that abortions sought on the grounds of ‘foetal defects’ or ‘congenital malformations’ were ‘incompatible’ with Article 38 of the Polish Constitution. Consequently, abortion has now become only legally permissible in Poland in either cases of rape and incest, or where there is potential threat to a mother’s life or health, or instances of irreparable damage to a foetus. Reportedly, these cases represent only 2% of all legal terminations in Poland. As Dunja Mijatović, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, stated in a tweet shortly after the announcement, the new ruling has in effect removed the basis ‘for almost all legal abortions in Poland’ and amounts to ‘a ban and violates human rights.’ However, despite the days of protest marches across Polish cities and popular backlash against the ruling, Poland’s shift towards a curtailment of access to abortion services echoes a growing trend among traditionally Catholic European countries as populist parties in Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Croatia, seek to emulate the Polish legislative model to disrupt what they perceive to be the overt liberalisation of abortion as a reproductive right.

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Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice

Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice

Published October 21, 2019

Reviewed by Kate Docking.

Reckonings, authored by Mary Fulbrook, analyses the various implications of Nazi atrocities on both an individual and state level. A key aspect of the book explores how the judicial punishment of those involved in National Socialist persecution in the decades following the war could vary vastly between states. The stories of Rudolf Zimmerman and Walter Thormeyer provide a particularly poignant example of this. Zimmerman lived a seemingly innocuous life before the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. Residing in a village near the city of Mielec in Poland, Zimmerman helped his father’s farming business. When the SS came to Mielec, Zimmerman soon became involved in Nazi atrocities; he murdered Jews, and was later also involved in selections and deportations. After the war, Zimmerman became a ‘model’ socialist citizen in East Germany; he even acquired awards for his work. However, Zimmerman’s dark past soon caught up with him. He was arrested by East German authorities in 1966, put on trial, and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1967. Walter Thormeyer, who was Zimmerman’s superior during the war, was tried in West Germany, and received a lesser sentence; he was condemned to twelve years in prison, in spite of the copious amount of evidence pertaining to his participation in murderous crimes. The cases of Thormeyer and Zimmerman are reflective of how East and West Germany often adopted different approaches to the handling of those involved in Nazi crimes; harsher punishments were (generally) dealt out in the GDR, whereas the Federal Republic embodied a more lenient approach.

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