Jackson Spielvogel, Hitler and Nazi Germany, 4th ed. (2000), Jan. 1933 to end
Sebastian Haffner, The Meaning of Hitler (1978), whole book
§Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 3rd ed. (1993), chs. 4-6

Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of both the "structuralist interpretation" and the "intentionalist interpretation" of the Third Reich (as set forth in Kershaw), and give your reasons for preferring one to the other. Use evidence from all your reading, and be sure to treat both sides of the issue.

Last week we addressed the fall of the Weimar Republic as a case study in the fate of democracy under pressure in interwar Europe. We were interested in the frailties of the Republic under the conditions of that time more than in the particular challenge that Hitler and the Nazi Party posed to the Republic. This week the subject is Hitler, the Nazis, and their regime, the Third Reich. In particular, we are concerned with the structure and functioning of the Nazi regime, and how the regime brought war and genocide to Europe.

After World War II people inside and outside Germany tended to see the Third Reich and its crimes as Hitler’s work, with not much more to be said. (This is "intentionalism": these things happened because Hitler meant them to happen.) Later, historians began to notice what a strange regime the Third Reich really was. It was very hard to see where policy and actions came from, even prominent acts like the economic recovery program, the outbreak of the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Some historians began to construct new ideas of how the Third Reich worked and what it meant, giving a much smaller role to Hitler than previously thought. (This is "structuralism": the Third Reich had systemic ways of working that tended to determine policy outcomes, at least in some matters.) But the "structuralists" have not convinced everyone, so that Hitler-centered analyses continue to appear alongside their competitors.

How could a complex modern country like Germany be governed (quite successfully, in some ways) by the barbarous, disorderly regime of the Nazis? What allowed an openly non-democratic government to sustain itself in such a society, and even to enjoy broad popularity? How could it come to focus its aims on war and genocide, so that it threw away its successes of 1933-38 in pursuit of its two terrible projects of 1941, conquest of the Soviet Union and extermination of Europe’s Jews?

In your paper you are asked to weigh the role of Hitler himself against the whole range of other explanations you may find. You may want to note, at least in your own mind, possible comparisons and contrasts to our earlier discussion of the role of Stalin, the father of Europe's other great totalitarian system.