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Daniel Siemens, “Alte Kämpfer” der NSDAP: Eine Berliner Funktionselite 1926–1949, German History, Volume 36, Issue 3, September 2018, Pages 476–478, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghy053
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Extract
Years before the National Socialists took power in Germany in 1933, they had already begun to cultivate the myth of the so-called Old Fighters (Alte Kämpfer), referring to those party activists who had identified with the political goals of National Socialism early on and had not shied away from making personal sacrifices for the sake of the ‘movement’. Next to such propaganda clichés, however, not much is known about the actual biographies, career trajectories and self-perceptions of these men. Against this background, Anja Stanciu’s substantial analysis, based on her PhD dissertation written under the auspices of the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam (ZZF), is most welcome. Together with Katja Kosubek’s recent edition of autobiographies of female Nazi activists, it contributes to our understanding of National Socialist party activism and the regime’s governmental techniques on the municipal and regional level.
Stanciu is the first scholar to take a detailed look into the biographies of those ‘Old Fighters’ who became Stadtverordnete (municipal councillors) and Kreisleiter (county leaders) in the capital city of Berlin between the late 1920s and the end of the Second World War. Neither fighters (in the literal sense) nor the proverbial Nazi hooligans, Stanciu argues that these men formed an important functional elite which successfully shaped local politics and contributed to the ‘Nazification’ of the previously ‘red’ city administration, alluding both to the traditional support for the political Left in many areas of the city and to the Prussian state as a stronghold of democracy during the Weimar Republic. They were of vital importance in the Third Reich as they contributed to the functioning of the regime by fulfilling indispensable administrative and political tasks on the municipal level.
