Book: “The Nazi World” under the scanner

History book –

How “the Nazi world” was established

Visiting Geneva, French historian Johann Chapoutot presented his latest work detailing the period 1919-1945. He answers our questions.

BotTalk

• Clear and well written, a new work of synthesis looks back on the rise, apogee and fall of Nazism between 1919 and 1945.
• It takes stock of the historiography and is particularly interested in the justifications of the actors of the time, who presented their criminal goals as “a saving epic”.
• It also evokes the Janus character of the regime for the Germans, intimidated, but also compromised, even complicit and ultimately chained to the regime.

What is the main contribution of your book?

It offers a synthesis of the Nazi world that does not exist anywhere else over a period from 1919 to 1945. This is why three of us joined forces to come to grips with it, with Christian Ingrao, a specialist in anthropology of violence, Nicolas Patin, specialized in social history, and myself focused on cultural history.

The Nazi world requires these complementary approaches: it is a world in itself, a mental universe to be considered from the inside. In this book, we also take the opposite view of this vulgate which explains the development and maintenance of the Nazi experience solely through violence. This is to quickly ignore the support that it was able to generate thanks to the creation of a specific mental universe and the real or symbolic gratifications offered by the regime to the population.

You emphasize the proliferation of nationalist movements in the 1920s. What explains the success of the NSDAP, Hitler's party, compared to its competitors?

From the start, the Nazis paid particular attention to political marketing, thanks to Joseph Goebbels, the future head of Propaganda. The latter, who was in fact the only solid intellectual in the inner circle surrounding Hitler, endeavored to organize society by working on ad hoc messages intended for its different components. Nazism thus offered its adherents and supporters a counter-society at a time when the usual frameworks were destroyed by the crisis of 1929. In short, Nazism thought of its message in an aggregative manner. He offered Germany explanations and solutions that the crisis of 1929 made audible.

Liberal political elites, industry, chose to ally with Hitler in 1932 thinking they could use him. Why did they fail?

These circles came up against a group convinced of the scientific accuracy of its explanation of the world. There was no room for negotiation, because you don't negotiate when you rely on these convictions that they believed to be based on facts, like applied biology or anthropology. Hitler was not alone. Beyond his person – he was above all an agitator, hypermnesic and not a genius as he thought – there was a whole group, a technostructure, ready to take over and which succeeded in transforming the German state into a dictatorship. laws and decrees in a few weeks.

1943 was a year of rupture. It was the year when the Nazi war became Germany's war. What explains this change?

In 1943, everyone in Germany knew of the atrocities committed by the SS and the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. The extermination camps are supposed to be secret, but it is still estimated that around 800,000 people were exposed to some aspects of the final solution, either by working in transport, in industry, etc. When the Eastern Front cracked and retreated, the Germans were terrified that the Soviets would take revenge and apply the treatment they had received.

Media under control, thugs in the pay of demagogues, crazy billionaires, the fascist recipe seems very contemporary. Are we also in danger?

Fascism is desired by many people these days. In the United States by Donald Trump and the Republican apparatus for example, but also by billionaires, like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and the Koch brothers. This is not a controversial accusation, since they themselves claim it. They demand the end of the rule of law, the purification of the State and the army.

What to do?

Resistance certainly involves education, critical thinking, which must help to face the attempts at manipulation created by alternative realities. But the fight is difficult. We see in France, for example, that economic power is sold to the highest bidder, political power is compromised, the press is drained or bought. There remain the courts. There also remains the self-organization of civil society, which we see, notably thanks to the work of Vincent Tiberj, that in France in any case, the proclaimed right-wing is a myth, since the country is particularly more and more open to ethnic and racial minorities.