The Early History of National Socialism
8 lectures/40 min each, mp3
professor Thomas Childers
University of Pennsilvania
The question that would arise in every discussion about the rise and fall of the Third Reich is why study the national-socialist experience, why look at the Third Reich. It is, after all, a morbid, depressing and terrifying topic. And yet it is the topic that has to be addressed, has to be analyzed, has to be coped with. In many ways it is the pivotal experience of XXth Century Western Civilisation, linking political, economic, social and moral issues that stay in the very core of our experience of the XX-s century. In other words we cannot afford not to try, not to understand what National Socialism meant, where 
it came from, who supported it, why, and how the regime was able to almost achieve its terifying ideological objectives. It's obviously more than an intellectual problem. The balance of power in the world was fundamentally altered by the Nazi regime, bringing in a way to the II World War to the eclipse of Europe and a rise of two great superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. In the process millions of people lost their lives either in the war itself, or as a result of Nazi terror and mass extermination.
01 - The Early History of National Socialism & Hitler
02 - Setting the Stage - Problems in German Democracy
03 - Nazi Election Politics
04 - Hitler's Assumption of Power
05 - Consolidation, Chaos, and Terror in the Third Reich
06 - Transforming the Ideology into Policy
07 - Hitlers Foreign Policy & the Preludes to War
08 - The Third Reich World War II & the Holocaust
