Word: gleichschaltung
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Throughout these first years of the Third Reich, Hitler imposed a process that the Nazis called Gleichschaltung, which means standardization or making things the same. All political parties except the Nazis were banned as divisive. Leftist union leaders were arrested and replaced by Nazis preaching the harmonious unity of the working classes (strikes were banned). Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, rallied students to a vast bonfire outside the University of Berlin, where the works of illustrious liberals (Emile Zola) and Jews (Heinrich Heine) were consigned to the flames. Jews were barred from public office, the civil service and professions like...
...Gleichschaltung...
...which, perhaps to their own surprise, they shared. A year of war hardship, in which rich and poor were sardined in the same shelters, dodged the same bombs, had acted as a strong leveling influence. Through his dive bombers and Messerschmitts Adolf Hitler had unintentionally brought about the same Gleichschaltung in Britain that years of repression and persecution had achieved in Germany. The British masses, plus a very large and rapidly increasing proportion of the middle and upper classes, were convinced that they did not want the Britain of the future to be governed by the big-business-aristocratic school...
...great Cardinal did these things, Carl J. Burckhardt's book described brilliantly this week. Carl Burckhardt is a Swiss and grandson of Historian Jakob Burckhardt, famed author of Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Before the Nazi Gleichschaltung, Biographer Burckhardt was League of Nations High Commissioner for Danzig. To the writing of 17th-Century history he brings an unusual firsthand knowledge of 20th-century practical politics. He also brings a keen grasp of the political mind, a powerful prose style. He uses them for a kind of historical writing in which, instead of reading history, the reader seems...
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