What made National Socialist Germany such a violent society? Focusing on the interrelationship between Hitler, the Nazi Party, state, and society, this chapter sketches the historiographical tradition of thinking about this question. Beginning with early analyses of the Nazi regime, as in Ernst Fraenkel’s Dual State (1941) and Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1941), it follows the tradition through the debates between intentionalists and structuralists, as well as newer approaches that focus on the war years, even seeing these years as representing a “second stage of the National Socialist Revolution” (Hans-Ulrich Thamer). Early work on the destructive dynamic of Nazi society focused on the first six years of the Third Reich, with scholars differing over the degree to which Hitler was a strong or weak dictator, with the best analyses emphasizing not just the “above” of dictatorship or the “below” of popular mobilization, but the interaction between Hitler, state, and society. The outbreak of the Second World War changed the dynamic significantly; it saw a dramatic expansion of the state in the form of occupation administrations and concentration and extermination camps.

This chapter observes instances in which the World Court has recognised that certain sources of international law may confer rights for individuals. It first identifies cases where the Court has interpreted relevant provisions of other international treaties, beyond the international human rights framework, as conferring rights on individual. In so doing, it analyses where the Court has applied ‘textualist’ and ‘intentionalist’ approaches to reach its conclusions. The chapter then notes where the Court has identified customary international law, the existence of which would confer rights to private persons in specific contexts. It notes that while there are ambiguities in the Court’s methods, this is characteristic of its approach to sources more broadly