Originally published in 1991 this study analyses the Bavarian monarchist movement and its place in the relations between Bavaria and the Reich during the Weimar era, with particular emphasis on the period up to 1929. Focusing on Bavaria’s peculiar historical position in the Reich as a staunch adversary of strong national political authority, the study has been anchored insofar as possible in local-level organizational and governmental archival sources. It makes extensive use of organizational and personal case-studies.

The part played by the many German and Austrian royal families in opposing Hitler has hitherto been overlooked. Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia was deeply involved in the German resistance movement and was questioned by the Gestapo following the 20 July plot on Hitler’s life; Otto von Habsburg, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was sentenced to death and escaped through Europe to America, where he helped coordinate attempts to liberate his homeland; his Hohenberg cousins (children of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand) were incarcerated in Dachau; Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria was exiled to Italy where he was pursued by the SS – his wife and children were captured and sent to concentration camps; the exiled Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein travelled between the USA and Britain assembling German exiles into groups representing the real Germany – that could assume power when Hitler was defeated. The sweeping away of German and Austrian monarchs in 1918 made the rise of Hitler possible; their successors helped make possible his defeat.

Revealing the bizarre truth behind the myth of a Nazi space fleet. If only the war had lasted another six months, then Hitler would have won ... because his scientists stood upon the very brink of inventing flying saucers.

Dachau and the SS studies the concentration camp guards at Dachau, the first SS concentration camp and a national 'school' of violence for its concentration camp personnel. Set up in the first months of Adolf Hitler's rule, Dachau was a bastion of the Nazi 'revolution' and a key springboard for the ascent of Heinrich Himmler and the SS to control of the Third Reich's terror and policing apparatus. Throughout the pre-war era of Nazi Germany, Dachau functioned as an academy of violence where concentration camp personnel were schooled in steely resolution and the techniques of terror. An international symbol of Nazi depredation, Dachau was the cradle of a new and terrible spirit of destruction. Combining extensive new research into the pre-war history of Dachau with theoretical insights from studies of perpetrator violence, this book offers the first systematic study of the 'Dachau School'. It explores the backgrounds and socialization of thousands of often very young SS men in the camp and critiques the assumption that violence was an outcome of personal or ideological pathologies. Christopher Dillon analyses recruitment to the Dachau SS and evaluates the contribution of ideology, training, social psychology and masculine ideals to the conduct and subsequent careers of concentration camp guards. Graduates of the Dachau School would go on to play a central role in the wartime criminality of the Third Reich, particularly at Auschwitz. Dachau and the SS makes an original contribution to scholarship on the pre-history of the Holocaust and the institutional organisation of violence.

"Derek Hastings illuminates an important and largely overlooked aspect of Nazi history, revealing National Socialism's close, early ties with Catholicism in the years immediately after World War I, when the movement first emerged."--Jacket.

Theories of justice often fixate on purely normative, abstract principles unrelated to real-world situations. The philosopher and theorist Axel Honneth addresses this disconnect, and constructs a theory of justice derived from the normative claims of Western liberal-democratic societies and anchored in morally legitimate laws and institutionally established practices. Honneth’s paradigm—which he terms “a democratic ethical life”—draws on the spirit of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and his own theory of recognition, demonstrating how concrete social spheres generate the principles of individual freedom and a standard for what is just. Using social analysis to re-found a more grounded theory of justice, he argues that all crucial actions in Western civilization, whether in personal relationships, market-induced economic activities, or the public forum of politics, share one defining characteristic: they require the realization of a particular aspect of individual freedom. This fundamental truth informs the guiding principles of justice, grounding and enabling a wide-ranging reconsideration of its nature and application.

In the mountain of books that have been written about the Third Reich, surprisingly little has been said about the role played by the German nobility in the Nazis' rise to power. While often confidently referred to, the 'fateful' role played by the German nobility is rarely, if ever, investigated in any real detail. Nazis and Nobles now fills this gap, providing the first systematic investigation of the role played by the nobility in German political life between Germany's defeat in the First World War in 1918 and the consolidation of Nazi power in the 1930s. As Stephan Malinowski shows, the German nobility was too weak to prevent the German Revolution of 1918 but strong enough to take an active part in the struggle against the Weimar Republic. In a real twist of historical irony, members of the nobility were as prominent in the destruction of Weimar democracy as they were to be years later in Graf Stauffenberg's July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler. In this skilful portrait of an aristocratic world that was soon to disappear, Malinowski gives us for the first time the in-depth story of the German nobility's social decline and political radicalization in the inter-war years - and the troubled mésalliance to which this was to lead between the majority of Germany's nobles and the National Socialists.