Volk Research Paper

With over 60 million people murdered, great cities reduced to rubble, and families ripped from one another, World War II will forever be regarded in history as one of the largest human rights’ abominations recorded in history. With the implementation of mythical nationalism and Volkish ideologies taught at German universities, Germany became the perfect opportunity for Hitler to rise into power and ultimately set his plan for world domination and Aryan supremacy into action. This paper will analyze history’s current arguments on how extreme nationalism contributed to the human rights’ catastrophes of World War II. Arguments that this paper will focus on include what factors were occurring in Germany that led to the German population to be able to support Hitler’s Nazi regime, as well as if Hitler’s “Final …show more content…
Mosse also discusses how the Volk particularly attracted teachers and professors in the education system because of it stimulated the intellectual and academic world to look back on their Germanic historic, cultural, and medieval mythical roots. From re-examining their history, the academic faculty pushed the idea of the Volk onto their students, provoking a younger, more radical audience to support the Volk. These students helped transform the Volk into a political movement in the universities, with a demand for German unity, supremacy, and statehood. Mosse argues how the academics came to view the Jews as the source of their problem; alien outsiders that lived in these urban industrial centers that infested the purity of the German