Search & Research, Lectures and Papers 32: Beyond Popular Opinion: Interpretive History In The Context of The Holocaust

This study examines the cultural history of the social experience of the internalization of the National Socialist ideology among young activists, focusing on the young intellectual elites of the SS apparatus, among other scholars, whose recruitment served to shape German society, to conceive of public policies, and to imagine the utopic future of the Volksgemeinschaft and the racial and millennial Empire that would be established through conquest. It sheds a different light on the evolution of historiography of Nazi Germany, as well as of the Holocaust, and advocates the development of a more interpretive historical approach to understand National Socialist militancy.