00 Dr. Childers Biography

Course Overview Know thy enemy. That’s what the wisdom of history teaches us. And Adolf Hitler was surely the greatest enemy ever faced by modern civilization. Over half a century later, the horror and fascination still linger. No one is better able to explain the unexplainable about this man and his movement than Professor Thomas Childers. In these lectures, you will see what great teaching is all about. Two Crucial Questions Professor Childers has designed this course to answer two burning questions that have nagged generations for decades, ever since Hitler and Nazism were destroyed. 1) How could a man like Adolf Hitler and a movement like Nazism come to power in 20th-century Germany? An industrially developed country with a highly educated population, it lies within the very heart of Western Europe. 2) How were the Nazis able to establish the foundations of a totalitarian regime in such a short time and hurl all of Europe—and the world—into a devastating war that would consume so many millions of lives? And the answers lead us to other questions: Who voted for the Nazis and why? How did the Nazis campaign? What did they seem to stand for? Why was there apparently so little resistance to them? What made the regime popular at home? How were Nazis able to seize control of the press, radio, courts, and police with so little trouble? Can it happen again? How can we make sure that it doesn’t? How did it all begin? You start by exploring the catastrophic impact of World War I on Germany and how the war and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles crippled the Weimar Republic.