
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
In the wake of the Second World War, the victorious Allied armies implemented a radical program to purge Nazism from Germany and preserve peace in Europe. Between 1945 and 1949, twenty million political questionnaires, or Fragebögen, were distributed by American, British, French, and Soviet armies to anxious Germans in positions of influence who had to prove their non-Nazi status to gain employment. Drafted by idealistic university professors and social scientists, these surveys came to define much of the denazification experience and were immensely consequential to the material and emotional recovery of Germans. In Everyday Denazification in Postwar Germany: The Fragebogen Questionnaire and Political Screening During the Allied Occupation (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Mikkel Dack draws the curtain to reveal what denazification looked like on the ground and in practice and how the highly criticized vetting program impacted the lives of individual Germans and their families as they recovered from dictatorship and war. Accessing recently declassified documents, this book challenges traditional interpretations by recounting a more comprehensive history of denazification, one of mid-level planners, civil affairs soldiers, and regular German citizens. The Fragebogen functions as a window into this everyday history.
Mikkel Dack is Assistant Professor of History at Rowan University and Director of Research at the Rowan Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights.
Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
4.3
3232 ratings
In the wake of the Second World War, the victorious Allied armies implemented a radical program to purge Nazism from Germany and preserve peace in Europe. Between 1945 and 1949, twenty million political questionnaires, or Fragebögen, were distributed by American, British, French, and Soviet armies to anxious Germans in positions of influence who had to prove their non-Nazi status to gain employment. Drafted by idealistic university professors and social scientists, these surveys came to define much of the denazification experience and were immensely consequential to the material and emotional recovery of Germans. In Everyday Denazification in Postwar Germany: The Fragebogen Questionnaire and Political Screening During the Allied Occupation (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Mikkel Dack draws the curtain to reveal what denazification looked like on the ground and in practice and how the highly criticized vetting program impacted the lives of individual Germans and their families as they recovered from dictatorship and war. Accessing recently declassified documents, this book challenges traditional interpretations by recounting a more comprehensive history of denazification, one of mid-level planners, civil affairs soldiers, and regular German citizens. The Fragebogen functions as a window into this everyday history.
Mikkel Dack is Assistant Professor of History at Rowan University and Director of Research at the Rowan Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights.
Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
3,193 Listeners
209 Listeners
4,362 Listeners
193 Listeners
162 Listeners
30 Listeners
161 Listeners
18 Listeners
63 Listeners
23 Listeners
110 Listeners
1,902 Listeners
61 Listeners
4,675 Listeners
6,274 Listeners
483 Listeners
5,240 Listeners
3,027 Listeners
12,979 Listeners
42 Listeners
170 Listeners
1,420 Listeners
2,095 Listeners
321 Listeners
59 Listeners