Category: Field Studies

I am not sure if anyone else has noted this, but a quick bit of research reveals that one of Albert Speer’s first assignments was to design the Nazi parade grounds in Nuremberg, or the Zeppelinfeld (I believe Moorhouse noted this in Chapter 5, but did not expand on it). These are the same grounds…

Reading the chapter “Brutality Made Stone,” I was reasonably shocked to discover the amount of time and thought put into architecture produced by the Third Reich. I had heard of Albert Speer beforehand, but did not guess that he was such a prominent figure, both to Hitler and to the Nazi Regime as a whole….

^^Title quote from 1984 by George Orwell Chapter 6 made me mad. It wasn’t just the forced labour, the hellish conditions for the Ostarbeiter, or the fact that I can count myself as part of one of the nationalities kidnapped and enslaved (as I am of French ancestry). It’s the fact that nobody ever teaches these things…

The title of this blog post is one of the vocabulary words we learned in German 491 this semester. It is a compound word, constructed using ‘expansion’ and ‘süchtig’, the latter meaning ‘addicted’. The word was used to describe Adolf Hitler, and after reading Chapter 5 of Berlin at War, I now completely understand why. It strikes…

Chapter 6 has provided me with the most information so far from this book. Before reading this I really did not know that labor and that people were forced into slavery during the late 1930’s early 1940’s. I really just through people got send to camps and worked there or got killed. Not only that…

Reading about the measures the Nazi regime took against Jews and others they considered ‘undesirable’ is always hard. There’s multiple things people are taught, people know, about these measures. Some of the largest include: deportation to ghettos, relocation to concentration camps, the Final Solution, exclusion from society, etc. I was a little shocked while reading Berlin at…

A particular name really stood out to me during these readings, Albert Speer,  was a fascinating and controversial figure during the late 1930s and early 1940s. I found it very interesting to read about him and his ability to sort of reshape how Berlin’s city looked in what I thought was a very quick period…

In Chapter 8, Hans Michaelis, a retired lawyer, is speaking to his niece, Maria, about the possibility of being relocated to a concentration camp. He tells her that he does not have much time before the SS arrive to take him away to one of the camps, so he asks her whether he should suffer…

Chapter 6 in Berlin at War discusses the labor force in the Third Reich. Many of which come from conquered lands, such as Poland, France, etc. These “foreign workers” were also known as forced laborers or even slave laborers. The process of being transported to camps was often long and cramped. Some camps were cleaner…

Although these names are not mentioned in Berlin at War, Eva Kor and Oskar Groning were living in Europe during the Second World War. Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor, was in Auschwitz for some time during the global conflict. Oskar Groning, a former SS guard, was responsible for the killing of thousands of innocent Jews….