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Entries on the Ideologies of War Website
(Alvarez – Herf)
Dr. Goebbels' Last Broadcast Speech, April 25, 1945 (Video)
Passchendaele (Video)
Our Ideologies of War website has established a reputation as a fundamental resource for scholars exploring the sources and meanings of collective forms of violence. Our website presents:
  • Primary documents by leaders whose ideas have generated societal violence.
  • Historical accounts and analyses.
  • Significant theories.
  • Videos conveying the experience of societal violence.

Understanding is not purely intellectual. New and disturbing ideas need to be assimilated—psychologically. In the next few issues of the Library of Social Science Newsletter, we’ll slow down—to integrate what we’ve learned so far.

Below are 32 entries appearing on our Ideologies of War website. Please click through any item to read the paper, book Chapter, book excerpt or speech. Please click any image to the right to view a video.

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Alvarez, Josefina Echavarría
Atran, Scott
Azzam, Shiekh Abdullah
  • Martyrs: The Building Blocks of Nations (Lecture)
    “History does not write its lines except with blood. Glory does not build its loft edifice except with skulls, Honour and respect cannot be established except on a foundation of cripples and corpses.”
Baird, J. W.
  • To Die For Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Book Excerpts)
    “During the Great War, propagandists and poets alike joined hands in exalting the blood sacrifice of the youth of Germany, thus transforming carnage into ethereal national revelation.”
Bein, Alex
Berman, Paul
  • Terror and Liberalism  (Book Excerpts)
    “It is odd to think that tens of millions of people might end up joining a pathological political movement. Surely, millions of people are not going to choose death, and the Jonestowns of this world are not going to take over entire societies.”
Bessel, Richard
  • Nazism and War (Book Excerpts)
    “Only weeks before unconditional surrender, on April 7, 1945, Donitz called upon all naval officers to fight to the bitter end. Military police and SS units patrolled behind the lines to catch and kill any soldier who might be suspected of desertion.”
Bin Laden, Osama
Bloxham, Donald
  • The Final Solution: A Genocide (Review Essay) 
    Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Commentary by Jürgen Matthäus, Martin Shaw, Omer Bartov, Doris Bergen & Donald Bloxham.
Bonadeo, Alfredo
Bteddini, Lida
Burrin, Philippe
  • Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust (Book Excerpts)
    “Hitler viewed his war against the Jews as a battle for the salvation of the world, a fight to the death that could only end with the extinction of one of the two adversaries.”
Fornari, Franco
  • The Psychoanalysis of War  (Book Excerpts)
    “War is a spectacular establishment of a general human situation whereby death assumes absolute value: the ideas for which we die have a right to truth, because death becomes a demonstrative process.”
Frank, Walter S.
  • The Reality of Battle: First World War, 1914-1918  (Book Excerpts)
    “In the deeper shelters, old and battle-hardened troops shook their heads. The new recruits with big eyes and quivering bodies were watched with apprehension. Some turned green and began vomiting. Some began sobbing.”
Fritz, Stephen G.
  • Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Book Excerpts)
    “To serve a Volksgemeinschaft, to believe in Hitler as the German Fuhrer—these were ideals pressed into the souls of German youth. ‘Our freedom was service’: this line from a Hitler Youth song reflected the ideal of devotion to the community—even to the point of death.”
Gentile, Emilio
Geyer, Michael
  • “There is a Land Where Everything is Pure: Its Name is Land of Death” (Book Excerpts)
    “The tide had irrevocably shifted against the German war effort in fall of 1942. The Wehrmacht fought for three years and the nation was mobilized in a total war effort notwithstanding the Nazi leadership’s knowledge that the war effort would not make a difference in the outcome of the war.”
Goebbels, Joseph
  • Dr. Goebbels' Last Broadcast Speech, April 25, 1945 (Video)
    Despite certain defeat, Goebbels continued with the propaganda: “Every Berliner is responsible for his house or flat. Those that show a white flag are no longer entitled to protection. Such houses would be disease-causing bacteria on the body of the city.”

  • The Jews are Guilty”: An attack on the Jews, November 16, 1941 (Essay/Speech)
    “Every Jew is our enemy in this historic struggle, regardless of whether he vegetates in a Polish ghetto or carries on his parasitic existence in Berlin or Hamburg or blows the trumpets of war in New York or Washington. All Jews are part of an international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany.”
Griffin, Roger
Gross, Paul
  • Passchendaele (Video)
    Excerpt from the film directed by Paul Gross, depicting a grotesque battle at Passchendaele (World War I, 1917).
Gullestad, Anders M.
Haig, Douglas
  • Features of the War (Report)
    “Our total losses in the war have been no larger than were to be expected. Neither do they compare unfavorably with those of any other of the belligerent nations. The total British casualties in all theaters of war, killed, wounded, missing, and prisoners, including native troops, are approximately three millions (3,076,388).”
Herf, Jeffrey