The historian Karl Schleunes writing about the history of Nazi Germany refers to the Twisted Road to Auschwitz. No straight path in European or German history either to the mass shootings, gas chambers, and crematoria of the Final Solution, nor to the triumph (temporary but enormously successful) of National Socialism in Germany.

The historian's question: Where does one start and what are the critical junctures.

With Martin Luther and the anti-Semitism of the German Protestant tradition: from Luther to Hitler, some have postulated. With the Thirty Years War and the bloody break-up into many German states. With the failure of German liberalism in 1848 and the top down unification in 1870/71: from Bismarck to Hitler, some others have postulated. With the bloody and authoritarian militarization of World War 1 and the bitterness against the Versailles Treaty that inspired the formation of the NSDAP. With the failure of that precarious experiment in social democracy and representative government -- the Weimar Republic -- to really reform key institutions of the Empire, such as the military, the judiciary, the civil service, and indeed the universities, where a highly conservative elite remained entrenched against the reforms of the welfare state and the cultural and social modernism of the 1920s.

Intentionalists vs. the functionalists. The Fuhrer's Wish as in Fleming, all laid out. Or the result of the barbaric contingencies of war -- racial and genocidal, but war, as in Browning.

But probably most immediately with the advent of the devastating economic crisis -- the Great Depression -in 1929, and its mass unemployment among the working class, and fear of proletarianization and loss of livelihood among especially the lower middle class of shopkeepers, small businessmen, teachers. In 1930, 3 million unemployed, by winter 1932-33 over 6 million, one of every 2 German families affected.

In the midst of crisis in September 1930, over 80% of the population went to the polls, and the face of Parliament changed completely. The number of NS deputies -- a small fringe group -- shot up from 12 to 107. The Communists too raised their vote. From now on Parliament would be dominated by two parties that did not take parliamentary government seriously, for very different reasons. And the Nazis in particular, appearing in Parliament in their brown shirts with red swastikas on their arms, did a good job of fulfilling their own prophecies of the ridiculousness of parliamentary government: heckling, disrupting, while creating an atmosphere of terror and disorder in the streets which they then presented themselves as the party of law and order to combat. A clever tactic.

It seemed to many -- in the middle class, among the Junker landowners who feared the Communists, among the big industrialists who had never liked the concessions they had to make to the Weimar welfare state -- that only the Nazi Party, a movement, claiming to stand above the fray of party politics and promising to unite all true Germans in a Volksgemeinschaft, a community of the Volk, could restore order, combat the Bolshevik threat, create jobs, and restore Germany's national pride -a rebirth of the nation.

January 30, 1933. After a meeting between Hitler and the senile President war hero Hindenburg at the home of a Cologne banker, that Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg under all the proper constitutional rules. After the failure of 1923 coup, the Nazis had learned their lesson, they would come to power legally, and indeed they did. No coup detat (unlike Prussia, July 1932), no revolution, just a gradual step by step process to power, by both popular support and terror.

Hitler's first cabinet had 8 conservatives and only 3 Nazis, but they were in crucial positions, the Chancellorship and Ministry of Interior in charge of the police and the terror apparatus. Still, the conservatives, with the military and foreign ministry thought they were still in charge. But the Nazis moved quickly to establish control, to synchronize the system in a process they called Gleichschaltung -- the making equal, pulling into formation of all social and political institutions, so that no real opposition would be possible.

The making of a dictatorship: by terror and by consensus.

Combating of unemployment. By Keynesian make-work programs.

The discrediting and outlawing of the opposition: Reichstag Fire, night of Feb 17, 1933, led to more emergency decrees which banned the Communist Party, much of fled or went underground. Still one last election -- March 1933 -- Nazis polled only 43.9% of vote, never achieved an electoral majority and were only able to put together a government with help of conservatives. Despite terror and banning of Communists, left still got over 30% of vote.

But March 23, 1933, the G erman Reichstag meeting in the Berlin Opera House instead of the burnt out Reichstag, by an extraordinary vote of 441-94 voted itself out of existence, passed the Enabling Act which gave total power to the regime and to Hitler as Chancellor.

Now came the quick steps of Gleichschaltung.

Multiple tracks of repression of political opposition, anti-sernitism and slow removal of Jews from public life in Germany, and a new racially based population policy -- a kind of biological politics -(Fleming refers to biological anti-semitism, the the Third Reich was a RACIAL STATE also in a broader sense

- that would seek to raise and reward the fit and eliminate the unfit in German society.

April 1, 1933, Boycott Day failure. Not possible to extricate Jews from economic life of Germany.

April 7, 1933. Civil Service Act. Remove all non-Aryans -- basically those with a Jewish grandparent and politically unreliable from government employment (lots of jobs from teachers to health insurance doctors to street cleaners) and also forced married women workers who qualified as double earners out of their positions. Quotas in schools and universities. Orwellian titles: Law Against the Overcrowding of German schools.

Not unpopular among young population worried about their future in wake of Depression.

Start the segregation of Jews from the public life of Germany, into which, although only 1% of the population (c. 1/2 million) they had been deeply integrated.

Beginning of a kind of social death and social isolation -- which would ultimately create the dehumanized impoverished creatures that the Nazis would declare fit only for extermination. A twisted road.

May 10, 1933. Bookburnings. Culture heroes of the 20s, EInstein, Freud, Brecht, Mann, Remarque, Hesse, Kafka reduced to ashes by enthusiastic students.

May 1933. Trade unions -- perhaps the most important alternative site of oppositional organizational and well as other independent associations and professional organizations (women's movement, health insurance) smashed. Remarkable ease. No energy left for opposition. Organize the DAF, Labor Front, unite workers and managers, clean bathrooms, some swimming pools. aesthetics.

June 1933. Beginnings of popular pro-natalist population policy. Marriage Loans for the eligible. Together with sharpening of anti-abortions regulations.

June 22, 1933. Fait accompli: SPD officially outlawed. Already happened.

July 8, 1833. Concordat with Rome. The Churches, another potential site of opposition, fall into place. Catholic Church surrendered all political rights in exchange for promises of maintaining control over its parochial schools.

July 14, 1933. Law Against the Formation of Parties. Germany officially a one party state. Ruled by a party that thought of itself as a dynamic movement, not a conventional parliamentary party.

July 14, 1933. Sterilization Law. The beginnings of a certain kind of genocidal practice. Even as marriage loans given to the fit, coercive sterilization of the unfit. NS attacks not only Jews but those among its own Aryan Volk who are unhealthy, mentally or physically -- from manic depression to hip displacement.

June 30, 1934. Night of the Long Knives. Another step in atomization of society, splitting up of any traditional social solidarities, wipes out his left wing, destroys Roehm of the SA -- in part the excuse was his homosexual excesses -- who had still stressed the socialist part of National Socialist and interfered, with the alliances with the churches, the industrialists, the Junkers. A kind of second seizure of power.

July 20, 1934. SA replaced by SS as the Party's independent military wing. A man named Heinrich Himmler on the rise.

August 2, 1934. The Army -- another potential site of opposition to Hitler's reckless policies -- falls into place. En masse, the famous Loyalty Oath to the Fuhrer which so many soldiers would later cite as their excuse for carrying out and abetting the massacres in the Soviet Union and the extermination of European Jewry.

Also in August 1934, Hindenburg dies, Hitler unites in himself offices of President and Chancellor; even in Italy the monarch continued to exist side by side with 11 Duce. Still there were pockets of opposition -- in city plebiscites -- yes votes as low as 68%.

Gleichschaltung marches on. Economic, political, population policy, racial.

September 15, 193 5. Nuremberg Laws If April Laws had sought to remove Jews from official public life, now try to regulate private life. No intermarriage or sexual relations. Try to define who is a Jew, a hard business in a society of high intermarriage, and many Mischlinge. Complicated categories which ultimately depend almost as much on religious identification as "racial" blood lines.

Called the Law for Protection of German Blood and Honor. A kind of coming together of traditional anti-Semitic legislation with racial hygiene goals.

The effect: more isolation and segregation of Jews. Neighbors, friends, classmates, families torn apart. A kind of apartheid which paradoxically led for a while to a real revival of Jewish culture in Germany, separate schools, sports, Kulturbund.

December 193 6. Hitler Youth Law. Try to capture the youth. c. 4 million, successfully with both boys and girls. A way of being rebellious without being subversive. Generational revolt sanctioned.

Indeed by 1936/37. Full employment achieved. A kind of economic miracle that went far to mitigate the signs ofterror, especially for those not particularly affected, not Jews, not Communists, not active Social Democrats or trade unionists.

Foreign policy successes. No opposition from Europe. Seen as man of peace. Can withdraw from league of Nations (1933), openly remilitarize, can retake parts of Rhineland, without opposition (1936, Saturday Surpise), seems to be a miracle maker, unstoppable. Even the Anschluss with Austria 193 8 and the annexation of the Sudentenland in Czechoslovakia without opposition. Seen as Man of Peace ironically. Manages to maintain a kind of Dual State with a lawful civil service and professional class side by side with the party.

No real resistance. Fuhrerprinzip well in place. Certainly grumbling, conflicts within the party, between party and state, conflicting allegiances, but regime able to neutralize and assimilate grumbling.

No place where resistance could really congeal. All sites of organization systematically smashed. Many in exile or in jail.

And still allow certain level of mass culture of 1920s to continue: movies, jazz, radio, coca-cola, youth groups, not completely reactionary rollback. In a sense privatization of the political, closing down of public sphere/ politicization of private, everybody organized, leisure time controlled, groups for everyone, the joke about the thief who left the portrait of Hitler on the mantle.

Not only anti-modern. Both Volkisch and technocratic. Pointed roofs and the autobahn. Triumph of the WIll, folk customs and gables of the old town together with mass rallies, airplanes, loudspeakers.

Stage is set for war: Another Great Escape Forward. Full employment achieved, some grumbling, time to act: the spirit of fascism demands violence, expansionism.

Many origins of World II -- also in Asia that can't go into here. The appeasement of the Allies.

September 1, 193 9. Germany invades Poland. Fortified by extraordinary Non-Agression Pact between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, August 21, 193 9. (Why, Stalin felt betrayed by Allies, buying time, many arguments).

Slow start but then a kind of Blitzkreig. April 9 through Denmark to Norway, May 10, take the Low Countries, Roll onto into France, roll right over the Maginot Line and on June 17, 1940, France falls ignominiously, would be half Vichy under hero Petain, half occupied.

Many different wars. Western Europe, Southern Europe (Italy), South Eastern Europe (Serbia), Eastern Europe Europe (Poland and Russia), North Africa (Rommel), and of course war in Pacific between Americans and Japanese which attained its own horrific levels of brutality, resulting finally in dropping of atom bomb, and war crimes trials for the Japanese.

But especially on the Eastern Front this would be no ordinary war. A war of extermination. Ultimately kill 17 million soldiers, 18 million non-combatants, altogether now 27 million Soviet citizens, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 6 million Poles, Sinti and Roma, Slavs..

Second World War even more violent than first, Often said, that if WWI brought new meaning to devastation of fighting, in WWII more dangerous to be on home front than on battlefront. Can talk about the barbarization of warfare, reaching new heights in Europe from World War I through World War 11, essentially the application on a mass scale in Europe of the exterminatory techniques that had been applied by European to colonized peoples previously.

And on the Eastern Front, the enemy was indeed broadly and racially defined: Slavic soldiers were not just antagonists, comrades in arms, but subhumans to be destroyed; Jews who were noncombatants were nonetheless enemies fit for killing because they were all dangers to the Volk, a particular form of partisan.

Defiance of international rules of war, the flouting of the Hague convention, the killing and mass starvation of Soviet prisoners of war, the destruction of civilians and villages (the scorched earth policy of the Germans in their retreat after Stalingrad, the drastic policy of reprisal for partisan or alleged partisan actions which did become bolder and more effective as time went on (I to 100 ration), the permission to treat civilians, especially Jews, as enemies - partisans -, the unclear lines between the role of the regular Army and the killing units of the police and the SS. And then the difficult legacy in both Germany and the Soviet Union of brutalized prisoners of war: Stalin would liquidate many Red Army prisoners when they returned for fear of them having been indoctrinated, German POWs languished under miserable conditions in Soviet camps, and in many cases did not come home until the mid-1950s.

So must tell the story of World War H in Europe and of the Holocaust in one lecture, try to remember the intertwining.

194 1. Operation Barbarrosa, attack the Soviet Union. Until then a war on the cheap. Hitler remember lessons of WWL not want antagonize the population, not mobilize women, no rationing, much booty from occupied counties, French wine, Soviet grain during Pact. No great sacrifices initially demanded.

Resist total war. And by December of 1941, some 4 million -- would go up to 7 million -- foreign laborers in Germany to do the work that soldiers couldn't go and women shouldn't do. And of course with Goebbels a master of propaganda. Keep up morale.

Stalingrad a turning point, as was entry of U.S. into war in December 194 1.

With War: a coming together of expansionist and exterminationist policies. Hard to disentangle in this twisted road.

From 1933 and especially 1938 -- Kristallnacht -- create Jews for Auschwitz. Process of isolation, impoverishment, emigration, expulsion, aryanization, ghettoization, extermination.

many steps along the way:

The isolation of April Laws and Nuremberg Laws.

The attempt from 193 5 to 1938 to encourage emigration , but under impossible conditions. Why didn't they leave. Well over half did.

Aryanization. Selling off of Jewish property at ridiculous prices so had no money with which to emigrate.

Clarified with Evian conference on refugees in 193 8 which made clear that no country in the world, gripped by Depression, wanted to accept refugees, impoverished professionals and businesspeople, without useful skills like farming (although hastening to learn)

Evian, naive spelled backwards, a polite death sentence.

Anschluss in Austria in 1938. 200,00 More Jews. What to do with them. Adolf Eichmann as Jew expert organizes emigration in months that had taken years in Germany. His laboratory. The pace steps up.

Rationalize Jewish problem. Try step up emigration proves.

July 3 1, 194 1. Goering ask Heydrich to prepare a Final Solution

December 1941. First killing camps. Belzec, Chelmo. Use of Ras tested on mentally handicapped and then Soviet prisoners of war.

January 1942. Wannsee Conference. Just to confirm the details. Discuss what to do with the Mischlinge. Never explicit. Film.

February 1942. Last emigration plan, to Madagascar is canceled.

Summer 1942. Final Solution full steam ahead. Not only in death camps, but also in ghettoes, work camps (Auschwitz, first for Soviet POWs) and then in the killing fields especially of Poland with shooting squads, hunting Jews mano o mano, not just the rationalized killing of gas chambers and assembly line trains.

That was unprecedented and unique. But also, as Day in Josefow makes clear, more familiar massacring, face to face killing. in the midst of all this Jewish life goes on. In the ghettoes. Accommodation, Judenrat in hope that work permits would save lives, -- work to live -- a rational assumption, in the forests with the partisans, in all parts of the Reich where people and children are hidden. Complicated question of resistance, really only when absolutely no hope, and willingness to accept total sacrifice. Came in Warsaw, Passover 1943 -- an anniversary now, when 80% of all the Jews already gone.

Final Solution a merger of three existing Nazi programs:

I.Concentration Camps, KZ (desgined first for political prisoners), 2.Racial Hygiene elimination of the unfit (also among the Aryans), first to use gas,

3.and forced transfer, resettlement to the East.

Different goals which all led to same genocide. Not a totalitarian system completely. Competing interests.

Bureaucratic killing -- clean -- vs. old fashioned massacres. Secrecy versus pride of documentation.

Himmler's Poznan Speech in October 13, 1943. No one knows, but to do this and remain decent is our greatness.

Rational versus irrational. Genocide right away versus destruction by labor, gaining something still from forced labor. Even the so-called hygienic argument used by Nazi bureaucrats in East that ghettoes must be cleared for hygienic reasons, to avoid epidemics among the larger population.

Incremental leaps to mass murder. Cumulative radicalization. Other options eroded. Seemed like the logical Final Solution.

Unique in history: in systematization, application of rationalized technology, the enormous transportation system, from Greece to Auschwitz, the huge network of camps, the insistence on maintaining the program even when clear that the war was lost and that it was not militarily a viable program, the insistence on total extermination: that is the commitment that women with children went first into the gas, a complete overturning of any traditional rules of warfare.

Something more than the banality of evil. Also face to face murder. But also this slow process first of social death and then of real death:

Identification, segregation, expropriation, expulsion, deportation, concentration, forced labor, extermination.

The Allies, as we know did not intervene, saw the most important task to be the victory in the war, and the regime did not collapse until the Red Army had literally fought its way into the heart of Berlin in April/May 1945. Almost immediately setting off another sort of international conflict: what to do with millions of displaced persons, with ravaged Europe, and the beginnings of the Cold War which would become global. And leave us discussing Differences among totalitarian systems. Differences between Stalinism and Nazism.