Martin Broszat

Broszat saw the Primary supporters of the Nazis as the middle classes, who turned to Nazism to alleviate their anxieties about impoverishment and "proletarianization" in the wake of hyperinflation in the early 1920s and the mass unemployment that began with the Great Depression.

Martin Broszat (14 August 1926 – 14 October 1989) was a German historian specializing in modern German social history.

Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, when Broszat was six, and World War II (1939–1945) had started when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, and France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, as they had warned they would.

After leaving school, Broszat enlisted and completed basic military training with the Wehrmacht (Stammkompanie des Panzergrenadier-Ersatzbataillons 108, Dresden), followed by officer training, then service at the front.

Born in Leipzig, Germany (the Weimar Republic), to a Protestant family, the second son of a postmaster, Broszat attended the Königin-Carola Gymnasium from 1937 and completed his Abitur there in 1944.

In 1944 a membership card for the Nazi Party was issued for him.

Broszat acknowledged having joined the Hitler Youth, but that a Nazi Party card existed in his name was first made public after his death.

It is not known whether he applied to join the party, or whether the card was issued to him automatically as a Hitler Youth member who had come of age; at that point, members were admitted from age 17.

His card (number 9994096) is one of ten million held by the German Bundesarchiv.

After the war, Broszat studied history at the University of Leipzig in the Soviet occupation zone, later East Germany, from 1946.

When he applied to study at the University of Leipzig in 1946, he answered no to the question on the form: "Were you a member of the NSDAP?"

By then, Leipzig had fallen under the control of the Soviet Union and had been annexed to East Germany.

The historian Norbert Frei writes that making a false statement would have been risky, and concludes that Broszat probably did not know that a membership card had been issued in his name.

He graduated in 1949, then undertook graduate studies at the University of Cologne.

From the late 1950s, he worked on the history of Eastern Europe, especially Poland, and on Nazi concentration camps.

He obtained his PhD in 1952, supervised by Theodor Schieder, for a thesis on German antisemitism, Die antisemitische Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland ("The antisemitism movement in Germany during the Wilhelmine period").

As a teenager, Broszat joined the Hitler Youth in Großdeuben (now part of Böhlen), at a time when membership was mandatory for "Aryans".

After university, Broszat worked with Theodor Schieder on the eight-volume Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa (1954–1957), and in 1955 he joined the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich.

The Institute had been founded to study the Nazi era; the head of its advisory board at the time was Hans Rothfels, who also edited its journal, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte.

Initially Broszat's work focused on German Ostpolitik (policy in the east), and antisemitism and fascism in south-eastern and eastern Europe.

Broszat joined the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in 1955 after obtaining his PhD from the University of Cologne.

In his book Der Nationalsozialismus (1960), published in English as German National Socialism 1919–1945 (1966), Broszat examined Nazi ideology, which he regarded as incoherent.

For Broszat, the constants were anti-communism, antisemitism and a perceived need for Lebensraum.

In his view, these were a cloak for the essence of National Socialism: an intense desire to realize the "rebirth" of "the German nation", and irrational hatred of those considered Volksfeinde (enemies of the German people) and Volksfremde (those foreign to the German "race").

(The death toll in the concentration camps was high nevertheless, from starvation, disease, beatings, and forced labour.) Holocaust deniers such as Paul Rassinier, Harry Elmer Barnes and David Hoggan made much of the fact in the 1960s that there had been no functioning gas chamber at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

Broszat noted in the letter that a gas chamber was built there shortly before the end of the war to convert Dachau into a death camp, but it was never used.

During this period he wrote two books about German involvement in Poland, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik (1961), which examined the German occupation of Poland, and Zweihundert Jahre deutscher Polenpolitik (1963).

The work won him accolades in Poland as one of the first German historians to offer an honest account of German–Polish relations.

A recurring interest for Broszat was why and how National Socialism had taken hold in Germany.

"Broszat's driving incentive was to help an understanding of how Germany could sink into barbarity," Kershaw wrote.

"That he himself had succumbed to the elan of the Nazi Movement was central to his motivation to elucidate for later generations how it could have happened."

In 1962 Broszat wrote a letter to the Die Zeit newspaper to "hammer home, once more, the persistently ignored or denied difference between concentration and extermination camps".

The Germans had built concentration camps in Germany, but their six extermination camps—built for the purpose of gassing Jews—were in occupied Poland.

His work at the Institute included serving as an expert witness for the prosecution at the 1963–1965 Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, and helping to debunk the forged Hitler Diaries in 1983.

He also held an honorary professorship at the University of Konstanz.

According to Ian Kershaw, Broszat made important contributions in four areas.

This led to his exploration of the structure of the Nazi German state, which resulted in his book Der Staat Hitlers (1969), published in English as The Hitler State (1981).

In the 1970s he became interested in Alltagsgeschichte and examined everyday life under the Nazis, developing the concept of "Resistenz" (immunity) and co-editing a six-volume work about Bavaria under National Socialism, Bayern in der NS-Zeit (1977–1983).

As director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History) in Munich from 1972 until his death, he became known as one of the world's most eminent scholars of Nazi Germany.

In 1985, he began the debate about the historicization of Nazi Germany, arguing that it should be studied like any other period of history, without moralizing and with recognition of its complexity.