The History of Hitler's Empire
The Teaching Company - Thomas Childers
(8 lectures, 45 minutes/lecture)
Know thy enemy. That’s what the wisdom of history teaches us.
And Adolf Hitler was surely the greatest enemy ever faced by modern civilization. Over half a century later, the horror and fascination still linger.
No one is better able to explain the unexplainable about this man and his movement than professor Thomas Childers.
With these lectures, you will see what great teaching is all about. As the Student Course Evaluations at the University of Pennsylvania put it: "Words do not seem adequate to describe Professor Childers."
Two Crucial Questions
Professor Childers has designed this course to answer two burning questions that have nagged mankind ever since Hitler and Nazism were destroyed.
1) How could a man like Adolf Hitler and a movement like Nazism come to power in, of all places, 20th-century Germany? After all, this was a highly educated, industrially developed country at the very heart of Western Europe.
2) How were the Nazis able to establish the foundations of a totalitarian regime in such a short time and hurl all of Europe—and the world—into a devastating war that would consume so many millions of lives?
Course Lecture Titles
1. The Early History Of National Socialism And Hitler.
2. Setting The Stage: Problems In German Democracy And The Rise Of The Nazis.
3. Nazi Electoral Politics.
4. Hitler's Assumption Of Power.
5. Consolidation, Chaos And Terror In The Third Reich.
6. Transforming Ideology Into Policy: Racial Policy In The Third Reich.
7. Hitler's Foreign Policy And The Preludes Of War.
8. The Third Reich, World War Ii And The Holocaust.