Semianr Questions:

• How did the Nazis change the political and social structure of Germany?

• What is the significance of this 'legal revolution' to our understanding of Nazi Germany?

Reading List:

Required Reading:

• David G. Williamson, The Third Reich (4th Edition) (Routledge, 2011) - Chapter 3

Primary Sources:

• Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State (February 28, 1933)
• The "Enabling Act" (March 24, 1933)
• 'The concentration camp at Oranienburg', 1933 (MRC)

Further Reading:

• Hitler in History (Podcast): Ian Kershaw, Mary Fulbrook and Niall Ferguson discuss different historiographical interpretations of Nazism (Note: this is from 2000 and the debates have moved on since; nevertheless it is a useful introduction).
• Richard Bessel, 'Functionalists vs. Intentionalists: The Debate Twenty Years on or Whatever Happened to Functionalism and Intentionalism?', German Studies Review Vol. 26, No. 1 (Feb., 2003), pp. 15-20
• Hermann Beck and Larry Eugene Jones (eds.), From Weimar to Hitler: Studies in the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1932-1934 (Berghahn, 2018)
• Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin, 2003), Chapters 5 and 6.
• Frank McDonough, The Hitler Years: Triumph 1933-1939 (Head of Zeus, 2019), Chapters 2 and 3
• Benjamin Hett, Burning the Reichstag (2014).

• Benjamin Carter Hett, '“This Story Is about Something Fundamental”: Nazi Criminals, History, Memory, and the Reichstag Fire', Central European History, Volume 48, Issue 02, (2015), pp 199-224

• Martin R. Menke, 'Misunderstood Civic Duty: The Centre Party and the Enabling Act', Journal of Church and State, Vol. 51, No. 2 (2009), pp. 236-264
• Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1886-1936 (London, 1998)
• Ian Kershaw, "Working Towards the Führer: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship", Contemporary European History, Vol. 2, No. 2, (1993), pp. 103–118
• Anthony McElligott, Rethinking the Weimar Republic (Bloomsbury, 2014), Chapter 9
• Karl Dietrich Bracher, 'Stages of Totalitarian "Integration" (Gleichschaltung): The Consolidation of National Socialist Rule in 1933 and 1934' in Hajo Holborn (ed.), From Republic To Reich The Making of the Nazi Revolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 109–28.
• Jeremy Noakes, 'Hitler and the Nazi State: Leadership, Hierarchy, and Power' in Jane Caplan (ed.), Nazi Germany (OUP, 2008)