I conclude the book by discussing how later historians used Roman law to imagine legal orders that were more appealing than their own conditions. I use two examples: Bracton, whose treatise on English law used Roman concepts to aggrandize jurists like himself within the legal system of the thirteenth century, and Fritz Schulz, a refugee from Nazi Germany whose writings imagined a Roman rule of law as an implicit counterpoint to the totalitarianism he had fled. I finally argue that this rhetorical feature of Roman law is not unique to the Roman context, but instead reflects a broader aspirational tendency in legal writing and historiography.

The relationship between change and international legitimacy is an important topic. History (international and national history) and legitimacy do not stand still but change over time. There is a relationship of mutual influence and dependency between the evolution of history, including the organization of international relations in it, and the evolution of legitimacy. As history evolves, the culture of legitimacy evolves; and as legitimacy evolves, history evolves. Keeping this in mind, the chapter first discusses the fact that scholars have tended to focus on the perceived importance of stability in analyses of legitimacy and change. Second, using that discussion as a foundation, the chapter contends that the goal of an international order should be the socialization of instability. Third, the chapter analyzes the relationship between the characteristics of an international order, or part of it, and the question of its change, including change and stability and their relation to legitimacy.

Chapter 3 explores the work undertaken by Carl Byoir and Ivy Lee for German interests, the subsequent Congressional investigation into that work, and the public backlash that followed. Byoir and Associates worked for the German Tourist Information Office, while Lee worked for I. G. Farben. These connections to Nazi Germany quickly came to the attention of the US government. Congress investigated potential subversive activities and conflicts of interest between private PR interests and America’s broader national interests. While neither Byoir nor Lee was revealed as a puppet of the Nazi regime, both were tainted by the association. The incident revealed the depth of popular concerns about the use of PR to promote foreign interests in the United States.

This chapter overviews the characteristics and circumstances predisposing people to lead or join hate movements with a particular focus on the virulent anti-Semitism that united figures such as Father Charles Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, and Henry Ford. By analyzing these figures and their followers, we extrapolate practices common among hate groups. After identifying character traits and risk factors (e.g., political and economic insecurity), we discuss their more modern manifestations. First we clarify our definition of hate groups as defined by the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Southern Poverty Law Center. We then extrapolate from these definitions to show how they align well with our definition of a cult. Following this, we acknowledge the challenges that accompany hate group designation while concluding that it is still vital for tracking modern-day hate groups and discrimination. We conclude by acknowledging the continued threat of hate groups and the presence of risk factors seen throughout history, such as global public health emergencies. We also discuss challenges unique to the technology age, such as epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. In summary, the chapter provides an outline of how hate groups come to be and provides a discussion of their continuing threat in society.

In 1925, as matrix mechanics was taking shape, Lucy Mensing (1901−1995), who earned her PhD with Lenz and Pauli in Hamburg, came to Göttingen as a postdoc. She was the first to apply matrix mechanics to diatomic molecules, using the new rules for the quantization of angular momentum. As a byproduct, she showed that orbital angular momentum can only take integer values. Impressed by this contribution, Pauli invited her to collaborate on the susceptibility of gases. She then went to Tübingen, where many of the spectroscopic data were obtained that drove the transition from the old to the new quantum theory. It is hard to imagine better places to be in those years for young quantum physicists trying to make a name for themselves. This chapter describes these promising early stages of Mensing’s career and asks why she gave it up three years in. We argue that it was not getting married and having children that forced Lucy Mensing, now Lucy Schütz, out of physics, but the other way around. Frustration about her own research in Tübingen and about the prevailing male-dominated climate in physics led her to choose family over career.

This chapter analyses garments in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, where clothing was a vital matter. Lice-ridden garments spread typhus, claiming hundreds of lives after the camp passed from SS to British control. Medical students and humanitarian workers, from the Red Cross, Friends Relief Service and UNRRA, worked alongside military personnel and impressed German civilians and Hungarian guards to check disease and bring Holocaust survivors ‘back to life’. Clothing was crucial to the restoration of dignity. Many survivors were naked or partially clad; those with garments often had nothing to wear but camp uniforms or plundered SS apparel. Where would sufficient garments be found to stock ‘Harrods’, as Britons nicknamed Belsen’s clothing store? Initially, clothing, shoes and bedding were levied from the German population near Belsen in a British military effort to enact retributive justice that encountered considerable resistance. The chapter also explores relationships between survivors, medical students and relief workers, as clothing and makeup ‘refeminized’ women survivors, and as Britons wrestled with ambivalence towards Jews and Jewishness.

This chapter builds the theory about how civilians form factual beliefs in war, walking through the two major factors that power the theoretical engine behind the book’s argument. First, it explores the role of people’s psychological motivation in how they think about the world and its application to belief formation in war zones. In general, people will be motivated to interpret events in a way that fits their prior worldviews in the dispute, but not everyone will do so: for those who are closer to the action, such biases are outweighed by an “accuracy motive” and the need to get it right. Then, it discusses the role of people’s information sources in shaping their factual beliefs. The media in conflict zones is particularly prone to fueling factual biases, but not everyone is equally vulnerable: those more directly exposed to the relevant events will often reject biased narratives due to their community’s local information about what is actually taking place. Ultimately, the chapter weaves these two factors together, showing how they jointly ensure that fake news spreads widely in war, but those who are close enough to the action tend to be more resilient and know better.

Ludwig Erhard was a severely injured WW I veteran. I present data on his vita. Erhard’s education ended with a doctorate at the University of Frankfurt/Main with Franz Oppenheimer, the “liberal socialist,” in 1925. After some unsuccessful years in his father’s textile business at his hometown Fürth, he was employed by the Institute for Economic Observation of German Manufactured Goods in 1929 in Nuremberg. In 1943, Erhard founded his own Institute for Industrial Research. I provide evidence that he had twice shown political turncoat behavior: from a liberal in the European sense during the Weimar Republic to Nazi economic-policy doctrines until German military defeat in 1943 became a foregone conclusion, and thereafter to the American conception of market instead of government-controlled economic conditions. I discuss Erhard’s qualifications for public office as well as the strengths and weaknesses of Erhard’s character.

Here, I deal with the issue of Hitler’s belief in Jesus’ divinity and show that, in contrast to what modern scholarship has thus far claimed about this question, Hitler did indeed refer to Jesus as divine on many occasions throughout his life. He even spoke of Jesus as the Son of God. I argue that Hitler’s views cannot be explained away by claiming that his words were simply clever propaganda intended to draw Christians into the NSDAP. The particularities of Hitler’s religious views and his interpretation of Jesus were simply too odd for them to act effectively as a propaganda tool designed to gain the sympathies of mainstream Christians. This chapter builds on an article that was published in the Journal of Religious History in June 2021.

The conclusion that Hitler was genuinely inspired by Jesus in his antisemitic struggle against the Jews thus cannot be avoided. Hitler viewed Jesus as the original Aryan warrior who had begun an apocalyptic battle against the Jews, but who had been killed before he had had a chance to finish the job. Historians must start taking Hitler’s (and the other leading Nazis’) religious beliefs seriously if we wish to fully understand how Hitler and his followers could be so morally convinced that what they were doing was the right thing – indeed, the “good” thing – to do. It adds significantly to our understanding not only of how Hitler could sway so many Germans to do what he wanted, but also of how the Nazis’ ultimate crime – the Holocaust – was possible to undertake in one of Europe’s most “civilized” and culturally and economically developed nations. Hitler thought he was following in the footsteps of Jesus – an alleged Aryan warrior who had dedicated his life to fighting the Jews – and that the National Socialists had a duty to finish what he was convinced Jesus had started: the eradication of theof the Jewish people from the face of the earth.

In this chapter, I cover the religious and ideological background development of how the character of Jesus came to be remade a Jew into an Aryan. I show the complicity of many leading Christian theologians in this development through their willingness to adapt to racist ideas and to integrate these into the Christian faith, thereby laying the foundation for what became National Socialist Christianity, most clearly embodied in the form of the splinter group in the German Protestant church known as German Christians (Deutsche Christen). This chapter is crucial in order for the reader to be able to understand how Hitler’s interpretation of Jesus could ever have come about and been accepted. It was not Hitler who created the idea of Jesus as an Aryan warrior attacking the Jews; Hitler only integrated an already existing and established idea into his own worldview.

In the last empirical chapter, I show the many ways in which Hitler’s belief in Jesus as an Aryan warrior turned Jesus into a moral/ethical, religious, and ideological role model for the Nazis. Hitler’s selective interpretation of Jesus’ life and mission meant that the latter was seen as an Aryan hero and combatant against the Jews. The story of how Jesus had cleared the Temple grounds of moneylenders was one of Hitler’s favorite images and one that he constantly brought up as an example for every Nazi to follow. The National Socialists were considered to be the true heirs and followers of Christ; but while the Jews had prevented Jesus from fulfilling his divine mission by killing him, the Nazis would indeed succeed in destroying the Jews and thus completing Jesus’ divine mission on earth. The chapter stresses the important point that Hitler believed his genocidal war on the Jewish people to be a mission sanctioned and proscribed by God.

Why is yet another book about Hitler necessary? Has not Hitler, the Third Reich, and National Socialism already been sufficiently mapped and described so that another book about these historical phenomena cannot but be superfluous? Judging by the constant stream of new books on the topic every year, the obvious answer is “no.” There does not seem to be a limit for the number of books that can be produced and consumed. The market appears to be insatiable. Granted, not every book written has been either necessary, or helpful when it comes to increasing our understanding of this part of our common history. Nonetheless, there may be a more interesting question to be answered here, namely: Are there aspects of this topic that have not yet been given quite the attention in the literature that they deserve? The answer to this question is an equally obvious “yes.” There are many issues and aspects of National Socialism that are in need of further research. Among them is the topic of this book: Hitler’s and National Socialism’s relationship to the central figure of Christianity – Jesus Christ.

This chapter deals with the two main sources of inspiration for Hitler’s religiosity, namely Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Dietrich Eckart. The latter was the man who acted as his ideological and religious teacher and father figure during the early 1920s, the self-proclaimed Catholic Dietrich Eckart. I argue that it was Eckart who was largely responsible for having introduced Hitler to the religious views that he came to have and express for the rest of his life. I focus on the fictive dialogue between Hitler and Eckart as laid out in Eckart’s book Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin (Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin) from 1923, which presents the National Socialist idea of Jesus in great detail. I argue that the reason why Eckart knew Hitler’s religious beliefs, including his views of Jesus, so well was that he in fact was the source of these beliefs. Furthermore, Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s ideas about the Aryan Jesus gave Hitler the foundation for his belief in Jesus as a viscious antisemite who became the role model for himself personally and for the National Socialist movement as a whole.