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This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license. On April 22, 1915, the German military released 150 tons of chlorine gas at Ypres, Belgium. Carried by a long-awaited wind, the chlorine cloud passed within a few minutes through the British and French trenches, leaving behind at least 1,000 dead and 4,000 injured. This chemical attack, which amounted to the first use of a weapon of mass destruction, marks a turning point in world history. The preparation as well as the execution of the gas attack was orchestrated by Fritz Haber, the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin-Dahlem. During World War I, Haber transformed his research in...
A collection of major articles representing some of the best historical research by some of the world's most distinguished historians.
Germany's imperial era (1871-1918) continues to attract both scholars and the general public alike. The American historian Roger Chickering has referred to the historiography on the Kaiserreich as an 'extraordinary body of historical scholarship', whose quality and diversity stands comparison with that of any other episode in European history. This Companion is a significant addition to this body of scholarship with the emphasis very much on the present and future. Questions of continuity remain a vital and necessary line of historical enquiry and while it may have been short-lived, the Kaiserreich remains central to modern German and European history. The volume allows 25 experts, from acro...
This book traces the importance of the United States for German colonialism from the late eighteenth century to 1945, focusing on American westward expansion and racial politics. Jens-Uwe Guettel argues that from the late eighteenth century onward, ideas of colonial expansion played a very important role in liberal, enlightened and progressive circles in Germany, which, in turn, looked across the Atlantic to the liberal-democratic United States for inspiration and concrete examples. Yet following a pre-1914 peak of liberal political influence on the administration and governance of Germany's colonies, the expansionist ideas embraced by Germany's far-right after the country's defeat in the First World War had little or no connection with the German Empire's liberal imperialist tradition - for example, Nazi plans for the settlement of conquered Eastern European territories were not directly linked to pre-1914 transatlantic exchanges concerning race and expansionism.
The Scientification of the "Jewish Question" in Nazi Germany describes the attempt of a considerable number of German scholars to counter the vanishing influence of religious prejudices against the Jews with a new antisemitic rationale. As anti-Jewish stereotypes of an old-fashioned soteriological kind had become dysfunctional under the pressure of secularization, a new, more objective explanation was needed to justify the age-old danger of Judaism in the present. In the 1930s a new research field called “Judenforschung” (Jew research) emerged. Its leading figures amalgamated racial and religious features to verify the existence of an everlasting “Jewish problem”. Along with that they offered scholarly concepts for its solution.
This book explores the wide-ranging consequences of Germany's short-lived colonial project for the nation, and European and global history.
“An engaging, compelling and disturbing confrontation with evil ...a book that will be transformative in its call for individual and collective moral responsibility." – Michael A. Grodin, M.D., Professor and Director, Project on Medicine and the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University Human Subjects Research after the Holocaust challenges you to confront the misguided medical ethics of the Third Reich personally, and to apply the lessons learned to contemporary human subjects research. While it is comforting to believe that Nazi physicians, nurses, and bioscientists were either incompetent, mad, or few in number, they were, in fact, the best in the world at th...
This volume offers innovative insights into and approaches to the multiple historical intersections between distinct modalities of internationalism and imperialism during the twentieth century, across a range of contexts. Bringing together scholars from diverse theoretical, methodological and geographical backgrounds, the book explores an array of fundamental actors, institutions and processes that have decisively shaped contemporary history and the present. Among other crucial topics, it considers the expansion in the number and scope of activities of international organizations and its impact on formal and informal imperial polities, as well as the propagation of developmentalist ethos and discourses, relating them to major historical processes such as the growing institutionalization of international scrutiny in the interwar years or, later, the emerging global Cold War.
John W. Thompson: Psychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust is the biography of a doctor whose revulsion at Nazi human experiments prompted him to seek a humane basis for physician-patient relations. As a military-scientific intelligence officer in 1945, Thompson was the first to name "medical war crimes" as a category for prosecution. His investigations laid the groundwork for the Nuremberg medical trials and for the novel idea of "informed consent." Yet, Thompson has remained a little-known figure, despite his many scientific, literary, and religious connections. This book traces Thompson's life from his birth in Mexico, through his studies at Stanford, Edinburgh, and Harvard, and his se...
For a long time agriculture and rural life were dismissed by many contemporaries as irrelevant or old-fashioned. Contrasted with cities as centers of intellectual debate and political decision-making, the countryside seemed to be becoming increasingly irrelevant. Today, politicians in many European countries are starting to understand that the neglect of the countryside has created grave problems. Similarly, historians are remembering that European history in the twentieth century was strongly influenced by problems connected to the production of food, access to natural resources, land rights, and the political representation and activism of rural populations. Hence, the handbook offers an o...