Skip to content
Clark University
  • Media Relations
Suggest a Story
ClarkNow logo
  • Topics
  • All Stories
  • In the News
  • Expert Sources
      • Info For

        • Media Relations
Suggest a Story

Prof. Kühne’s latest book explores comradeship among German soldiers during world wars

April 3, 2017
By Clark News & Media Relations

Prof. Kühne

In his new book, “The Rise and Fall of Comradeship: Hitler’s Soldiers, Male Bonding and Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century” history professor and director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies Thomas Kühne examines how the concept of comradeship shaped the actions, emotions and ideas of ordinary German soldiers across the two world wars and during the Holocaust.

book coverIn “The Rise and Fall of Comradeship,” (Cambridge University Press), Kühne uses individual soldiers’ diaries, personal letters and memoirs to reveal the ways in which soldiers’ longing for community, and the practice of male bonding and togetherness, sustained the Third Reich’s pursuit of war and genocide.

Kühne’s book explains how comradeship fueled fighting morale and propelled soldiers forward into war crimes and acts of mass murders. Yet, by practicing comradeship, the soldiers could maintain the myth that they were morally sacrosanct. After 1945, the notion of kameradschaft  became “a leitmotif of the public memorialization of the Second World War,” Kühne writes. “Once widely accepted as the epitome of altruistic solidarity and cooperation, of moral goodness, oh humanness per se, the concept came, by the end of the twentieth century, to be seen as a euphemism for criminal complicity and cover-ups — for collectively committed, clandestine evil.”

“Thomas Kühne illuminates the moral world of Nazi Germany on its own terms, a world in which most German soldiers acted as they did, not because they were forced to do so, but because they thought it was right,” writes noted Holocaust historian Christopher Browning. “Obsessed with the ‘virtue’ of being held in high esteem by their ‘masculine’ comrades, they had scant concern for their victims. This book makes an essential contribution to understanding the capacity to commit terrible atrocities without remorse in Nazi Germany.”

Kühne earned a Ph.D. at the University of Tübingen and won the German Bundestag Research Prize for his dissertation on electoral politics in Imperial Germany (published 1994). He has been at Clark since 2004. In 2010, he was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and spent his sabbatical year as fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he had been a member before coming to Clark. His previous works and publications include “Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945,” (Yale University Press 2010), which explores how Germans’ adherence to community-based violent ethics that allowed them perpetrate and support the Holocaust.

Share
Social SciencesArts & Humanities

Related Stories

More from this topic
Jonas Clark Hall at Clark University
Clark welcomes new tenure-track and visiting faculty for 2020–21 academic year
Stanley Pierre-Louis art
Stanley Pierre-Louis ’92 makes work of play
More from this topic
  • Apply
  • Visit
  • Request
  • Give
Helpful Links
  • Offices
  • News helpful link
  • Calendars and Events
  • Campus Store
  • Employment
  • Campus Safety
  • University Policies
  • Website Feedback
  • Contact Us
Follow Us
  • See more of us on Facebook
  • See more of us on Twitter
  • See more of us on Instagram
  • See more of us on Snapchat
  • See more of us on YouTube
  • See more of us on LinkedIn
Clark University footer logo Clark University
Challenge Convention.
Change Our World.
508-793-7711
950 Main Street Worcester, MA 01610
Copyright © 2021 Clark University Public Information | Privacy Policy | Accessibility
We use cookies on our website to offer a better browsing experience, analyze web traffic and personalize content. By using our website, you agree to the use of cookies as described in our Privacy Policy.Accept and Continue