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.

Antisemitism was a determining feature of Nazi ideology. The racial state was to be established through the so-called “Judenpolitik,” which aimed to “reduce Jewish influence,” make life for Jews in Germany difficult or impossible, and eventually drive Jews out of Germany. Although this policy was directly inspired by Hitler’s own thinking and by Nazi ideology, the resulting discrimination and persecution, culminating in genocide, was not a linear top-down process but rather the result of a dynamic interaction between central Nazi Party and state institutions, often triggered by bottom-up initiatives by local party activists at municipal level. Terror against Jews was used to drive this policy. It encompassed coercion and violence against Jews or people considered to be Jewish accompanied by legal measures to oust Jews from public life in Germany, reflecting what émigré lawyer Ernst Fraenkel described as a “dual state”: a “state of measure or action,” which used terror to quench opposition and fight “racial opponents,” and the “state of norms,” which employed legislation to achieve its aims while preserving legal certainty in order to avoid antagonizing majority society.