As the sovereign of a newly fashioned kingdom facing uncertain prospects, King Ludwig I of Bavaria launched a sprawling building program to transform his capital city, Munich. Ludwig believed that the patronage of art and architecture would enhance his political authority and foster a sense of historical legitimacy in his kingdom. He regarded this building program as a way of expressing and impressing on the public his own views of politics, culture, and history, but the associated financial burden became a source of public discontent, a focal point for political opposition, and, ultimately, a factor in Ludwig's later abdication. Public sentiment and scholarly opinion toward Ludwig nevertheless underwent a broad rehabilitation after his reign. Many soon came to view Ludwig's projects as expressions of the monarch's cultural sophistication and generosity, rather than as instruments of political and ideological calculation.

The attack against the Soviet Union was ideologically motivated, but the timing owed a great deal to military and economic considerations. German hopes largely focused on Ukraine, which was expected to be both a giant breadbasket and a reservoir of essential minerals. But plans for the economic exploitation of Ukraine were flawed from the beginning and remained inconsistent throughout the war. Substantial reconstruction efforts only began belatedly and were accompanied by brute force that combined economic logic with ideological zeal. The Nazi policies of racist repression and mass murder were, then, both a means of and an obstacle to exploitation of the East. Yet, they were also successful: without the raw materials obtained from Ukraine, the Nazi war machine would have likely ground to a halt well before 1945. The cost of sustaining the German war effort was consequently borne, to a large extent, by the local population, which labored under appalling conditions both in the Reich and in Ukraine itself.

In the final months of World War II, more than a million German children took to the roads in search of family and home. Although the majority returned home with little institutional support, hundreds of thousands of other German children could not. Some were orphaned; others remained in camps, children's homes, or foster families in areas that no longer belonged to Germany. Most challenging for authorities were those who were alone and too young to know their own names. This article explores the struggle to locate, identify, and provide for missing, lost, and displaced German children after 1945. It argues that despite a general agreement that children were in peril, Allied denazification policies and the decision by the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) not to help “enemy children” compromised care for children. The division of Germany and the onset of the Cold War further handicapped efforts to aid children by preventing the creation of a unified search service. Yet, despite the many postwar impediments, the effort to care for these children was remarkably successful in the end.

This article focuses on the joint campaign of “remigrés” and American authorities to “westernize” the local Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Berlin during the early Cold War. The years 1948 to 1958 witnessed one of postwar Germany's most bitter intraparty struggles for leadership within the Berlin SPD, where a faction of remigrés led by Ernst Reuter and Willy Brandt wrestled for control with the so-called Keulenriege around Franz Neumann. Examining clandestine American support for the remigré faction, which included favorable media coverage and considerable financial contributions, this article focuses in particular on the political maneuvering of a German-American network around Shepard Stone, political advisor to U.S. Commissioner John McCloy. An investigation of the postwar power struggle within the Berlin SPD offers fresh perspectives on three related subjects: the role of remigrés in postwar Germany history; the political clout of informal German-American networks; and West Berlin as an alternative laboratory of German democratization.

As archival scholarship on National Socialism moved under way during the later 1960s, study of the Right's broader intellectual history relied on a small number of then canonical works—by Klemens von Klemperer (1957), Otto E. Schüddekopf (1960), Fritz Stern (1961), Hans-Joachim Schwierskott (1962), and Kurt Sontheimer (1962), shadowed by Armin Mohler's Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Grundriβ ihrer Weltanschauungen (1950)—soon to be joined by George Mosse (1964), Herman Lebovics (1969), and Walter Struve (1973). At this stage, with the exception of Fritz K. Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins (1967) and Reinhard Bollmus's study of Alfred Rosenberg's office and its opponents (1970), there was virtually nothing taking a broader social or institutional approach to the contexts of Nazi ideology and the sociology of knowledge under the Third Reich. Gerhard Kratzsch's Kunstwart und Dürerbund. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (1969) stood very much alone as a nuanced, archivally researched case study alive to the complex ambivalences of cultural nationalism in the Wilhelmine years.