6HI03/D the Challenge of Fascism
6HI03/D – The Challenge of Fascism
SECTION A
Answer ONE question in Section A on the topic for which you have been prepared.
D1 – From Kaiser to Führer: Germany, 1900–45
Answer EITHER Question 1 OR Question 2.
EITHER
1. ‘The impact of the First World War merely heightened existing social and political tensions
which had divided Germany before 1914.’
How far do you agree with this judgement?
OR
2. ‘The chaotic nature of the Nazi governmental structure explains the failures in German
war production during the Second World War.’
How far do you agree with this judgement?
TOTAL FOR SECTION A: 30 MARKS
SECTION B
Answer ONE question in Section B on the topic for which you have been prepared.
D1 – From Kaiser to Führer: Germany, 1900–45
Study Sources 1 to 6. Answer EITHER Question 5 OR Question 6.
EITHER
5. Use Sources 1, 2 and 3 and your own knowledge.
‘Decisions made in Berlin from 1900 determined the outbreak of war in Europe in August
1914.’
How far do you agree with this opinion? Explain your answer, using the evidence of
Sources 1, 2 and 3 and your own knowledge of the issues related to this controversy.
OR
6. Use Sources 4, 5 and 6 and your own knowledge.
‘The Nazi regime depended more on its broad popularity than on terror in the years
1933–39.’
How far do you agree with this opinion? Explain your answer, using the evidence of
Sources 4, 5 and 6 and your own knowledge of the issues related to this controversy.
(Total 40 marks)
Sources for use with Section B. Answer ONE question in Section B on the topic for which youhave been prepared.
D1 – From Kaiser to Führer: Germany, 1900–45
Sources for use with Question 5
SOURCE 1
(From Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918, published 1985)
In the 1890s, commercial rivalry in the world’s markets increased dramatically. Above all, German policy embarked on a collision course with Britain’s vital interests when the decision was taken to expand the battle fleet. From the time of the first Supplementary Navy Bill of 1900, there was no doubt as to Germany’s aims, with their sometimes openly declared, sometimes carefully concealed, aggressive intent. Nor was there any inclination in London to meet this new danger with a child-like trust. Germany’s naval policy was too unmistakably bound up with ‘the image of the enemy across the Channel’ for the British to sit back and wait for things to happen. We need to bear in mind both the domestic political dimensions of the ‘Tirpitz-Plan’, as well as the German decision not to yield on battleship building. That plus the decision to arm against Britain on such a massive, concentrated scale, without cause from London, shows how Germany’s moves on the chess board determined the rules of the game up to 1914.
SOURCE 2
(From Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, published 1998)
The extent of German malice aforethought must not be exaggerated. For men who have been accused of planning a war, the senior members of the German General Staff were uncannily relaxed in July 1914. At the time the Kaiser issued his famous ‘blank cheque’ to the Austrians, Moltke, Waldersee, Groener, chief of the Railway Section, and Major Nicolai, the head of key intelligence agency Section 111b, were all on holiday (in separate resorts, it should be said). Tirpitz and Admiral von Pohl were too. It was only on 16th July that Nicolai’s stand-in, Captain Kurt Neuhof, was advised to step up surveillance of Russian military activity. Nicolai himself was not back at his desk for another two days. Even then his orders to the so-called ‘tension travellers’ – ie German spies in Russia and France – were merely to find out ‘whether war preparations are taking place in France and Russia’.
SOURCE 3
(From John Keegan, The First World War, published 1998)
The existence of a permanent medium of negotiation between the European powers might have robbed the war plans that lay in their pigeonholes of their menacing capacity to determine events instantly. In Germany, Russia and Austria, where the sovereign was commander in chief both in name and fact, and where each organ of the military system answered directly to him, communication between these different organs was beset by secretiveness and jealousy. The system, disastrously, took its most extreme form in Germany. In the crisis of 1914, the Kaiser, when he alone might have put the brakes to the inevitable progression of the Schlieffen Plan, found he did not understand the machinery he was supposed to control. He panicked and let the Schlieffen Plan determine events.
D1 – From Kaiser to Führer: Germany, 1900–45
Sources for use with Question 6
SOURCE 4
(From Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler, published 2001)
Most people in Nazi Germany had no direct confrontation with the Gestapo, Kripo, or the concentration camps. Moreover, while they read many stories about the ‘People’s Court’, rather few people attended its sessions. In other words, for most Germans, the coercive or terroristic side of Hitler’s dictatorship was created by what passed along by word of mouth, by what they read in the press, or heard on the radio. Historians have paid remarkably little attention to these representations, when in fact these played an important role in the dictatorship. At every level, there was much popular support for the expanding missions of the new police and the
camps, especially as the latter were presented in the media and elsewhere as boot-camps in which the state would confine both ‘political criminals’ and variously defined asocials, in order to subject them to ‘work therapy’.
SOURCE 5
(From Richard J Evans, The Third Reich in Power, published 2005)
At the same time, the Gestapo was only part of a much wider net of surveillance, terror and persecution cast by the Nazi regime over German society in the 1930s; others included the SA and SS, the Criminal Police, the prison service, the social services and employment offices, the medical profession, health centres and hospitals, the Hitler Youth, the Block Wardens. Even apparently politically neutral organizations like tax offices, the railway and the post office were involved. All of these provided information about deviants and dissidents to the Gestapo, the courts and the prosecution service, forming a very mixed, uncoordinated but pervasive system of control, in which the Gestapo was merely one institution among many. Everything that happened in the Third Reich took place in a pervasive atmosphere of fear and terror, which never slackened and indeed became far more intense towards the end. ‘Do you know what fear is?’ an elderly worker asked an interviewer some years after it was all over: ‘No’. ‘The Third Reich was fear,’ the worker replied.
SOURCE 6
(From E A Johnson, The Nazi Terror, published 1999)
The key to understanding the sometimes brutal, but always effective, Nazi terror lies in its selective nature. Never implemented in a blanket or indiscriminate fashion, it specifically targeted and ruthlessly moved against the Nazi regime’s racial, political and social enemies; at the same time it often ignored or dismissed expressions of non-conformity and mild disobedience on the part of other German citizens. The two-way treatment of different sections of the German population helped the Nazi regime to gain support among the populace. Indeed, many Germans perceived the terror not as a personal threat to them but as something that served their interests by removing threats to their material well-being and to their sense of community and order.